This clip of Haviv Rettig Gur, who is one of this era’s most compelling voices about Israel and Zionism, went viral just a few weeks ago. I share it here because, though I’m not nearly as articulate as Haviv is, I agree with him. Completely.

Still, life richly lived is also about encountering people and ideas that trouble us. Israel from the Inside does that regularly, as a matter of principle. Today, even as Israel is at war fighting for its very future—and because the subject echoes some of the themes of Purim, such as loyalty, danger, Diaspora and the like—we are devoting a post to discussing young American Jews who are opposed to Israel’s very existence.

It’s not an easy topic. But given the number of young American Jews who are anti-Zionists, it matters—which is precisely why we’re engaging it.

Three years ago, when Abi Dauber Sterne and Robbie Gringras published For the Sake of Argument, I invited Abi to join me on our podcast to learn more about their book and how she and Robbie hoped they could teach people to have civil conversations (or even arguments) about Israel.

A few weeks ago, Abi shared with me research that she and Robbie had recently done on young American anti-Zionists. You might ask, “Is that a large enough group to merit study?” In fact, it is. According to a recent JFNA study, only 35% of young American Jews age 18-34 define themselves as “Zionist,” while 32% define themselves as either “anti-Zionist” or “non-Zionist.”

That latter number is bound to increase in the years to come.

Abi and Robbie spent time trying to understand what led these people to have the views that they hold. I found their research both fascinating and heartbreaking. It also raises profound policy questions for the American Jewish establishment. Should these people be pushed to the margins of American Jewish life and ignored? Should American Jewish institutions reach out to them and make space for them “in the tent”?

Lest there be any doubt, Abi and Robbie are both deeply committed Zionists. Abi moved to Israel from the United States, while Robbie made aliyah from the UK. Their own commitments aside, however, they managed to paint a portrait of these anti-Zionists that was deeply human and compelling.

I invited Abi to share with us what they’d learned and the policy questions that emerge from their work. After you’ve heard her, you can decide whether and how this growing part of the North American Jewish community is worth engaging. Any decision we make will be fraught with risk, which is why the subject is so important and so urgent.

To read more about Abi’s and Robbie’s research, click here.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today..

Abi Dauber Sterne is co-director and co-author of For the Sake of Argument, an initiative that harnesses the energy of healthy arguments to create educational engagement. Abi has worked in the United States and Israel as an educational leader for more than 20 years, including serving as Limmud NY’s founding director, VP for Jewish Education at Hillel International, and Director of the Jewish Agency for Israel's Makom, among other roles.

Abi was a Senior Schusterman Fellow, holds an MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and rabbinical ordination from The Beit Midrash for Israeli Rabbis run by The Shalom Hartman Institute and HaMidrasha at Oranim.

She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and four children. Her family dinner table is always a raucous mixture of laughter and disagreement.

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

One day, this war that we’re about to have (?) will be over. Or it won’t happen. Or it won’t happen for now. No matter how this plays out, though, there will come a time, probably not too long from now, when the war will no longer make it impossible to focus on anything else.

And when that happens, and when Israel “gets back to business,” the issue of a commission of inquiry about October 7th will return to the news. It will certainly be a key issue in the upcoming election campaigns.

So, what’s at stake? What is it that the PM wants? And how is that different from what the opposition and most of the public want?

Following the near-catastrophic failures of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel established the Agranat Commission — a classic state commission of inquiry, named after Supreme Court President Shimon Agranat who chaired it. Its members were appointed by the president of the Supreme Court rather than by the government, giving it independence from the politicians whose decisions were under scrutiny. The commission had broad investigative powers, including the ability to subpoena witnesses, and its findings carried enormous legal and political weight. It ultimately led to the resignation of IDF Chief of Staff David Elazar and other senior military figures, and its conclusions deeply shaped how Israelis understood the war's failures. This model — independent, judiciary-appointed, with real enforcement authority — became the gold standard for investigating major national disasters in Israel.

Rather than a traditional state commission of inquiry, Netanyahu has pushed for what critics call a government-controlled alternative. Israel has traditionally appointed an independent state commission of inquiry, led by a retired judge, following major governmental failures, but Netanyahu's government has instead moved to establish its own probe, with the commission's mandate determined by cabinet ministers. Crucially, members of Netanyahu's proposed commission would be picked by the Knesset (which Netanyahu essentially controls) rather than by the Supreme Court president, as mandated under the current law for state commissions of inquiry.

So, it would seem cut and dried that one version makes sense while the other does not. But as we hear from Uri Kaufman today, there are alternative views. Kaufman explains what the advantages of each are, what the dangers for Netanyahu are in each case, and why one can make a very good argument for precisely the kind of commission that Netanyahu seeks.

Many in the opposition would take issue with some of what Uri Kaufman believes, but that is all the more reason to be exposed to this worldview. If his explanation of what’s at stake leaves you wondering which route makes more sense … well, that’s the whole purpose of this project.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Uri Kaufman has been on our podcast before, when we discussed his book, Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East (St. Martin’s Press), soon after it appeared. Kaufman’s book was the first history of the Yom Kippur War to be released in twenty years, and drew from never-before-seen declassified documents.

Uri Kaufman has been published in Foreign Affairs, Mosaic, and The Forward. After putting himself through CUNY’s Queens College at night, he attended New York University School of Law and graduated with honors in 1989. Uri subsequently became a real estate developer, specializing in adaptively restoring historic buildings, winning awards at the national and state level.

To Uri Kaufman’s website, click here.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

Yes, you read that correctly. Some people are insisting that there was no massacre on October 7 — and chief among those “some people” is our Prime Minister.

David Horovitz sums it up very well (it’s a screenshot, so the links are not active):

It should not surprise you that those people whose loved ones were killed in what they’d long thought was a massacre on October 7 found the whole thing not just confusing, but stupefying and horrifying — another attempt on the part of the PM not just to lie (because really, 1400 dead people isn’t a massacre?) but to rewrite Jewish history to suit his own political goals.

As you saw in the clips of the PM in the video at the top, he used to call it a massacre at every possible opportunity. But then his political needs changed.

An Israeli group called Democracy Now posted a video of Shirel Hogeg, from Ofakim (where there was, actually, something that was much more than an “event”), gently explaining to the PM that where he lives and where he was on October 7th, there was most certainly a massacre.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

The Prime Minister had been scheduled to address a major gathering of a leading American Jewish organization this coming week. At present, both because he had to travel last week to see Donald and because he might be a tad busy next week running a war, it now appears that he’ll address the confab virtually — meaning that he’ll record some utterly predictable video in the middle of the night and they’ll play it and everyone will get all excited.

What’s that got to do with the issue above what October 7 really was?

Had the Prime Minister actually travelled to DC to address the gathering, he would have received a standing ovation. About that, there’s no doubt.

It’s quite possible that the organization had no choice but to invite him, though that’s far more debatable than it’s willing to acknowledge. Another possibility would have been to invite him, but for him not to be applauded when he was done. Or a barely polite smattering of quiet applause, perhaps.

But no, he would certainly have gotten a standing ovation. Because that’s how people think they need to respond when in the presence of Benjamin Netanyahu. Why, I’m not entirely certain. But cult-like, that’s what they do.

In the meantime, we Israelis, in the grips of a government that will not shut down the horrific Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria, that will not address the murder slaughterhouses that Arab cities in this country have become, that will not lay down the line with the Haredim and demand some change in their anti-Zionist rhetoric and behavior, that is now insisting that there was actually no massacre on October 7—we, who live with that every day and watch the coalition whittle away at the very essence of this country, would have had to watch supposed “lovers of Israel” and “supporters of Israel” cheer the man who’s taking it apart.

Many people I speak to here, when they hear about those standing ovations, are simply bewildered. “What are they there to support,” people wonder, “a nation and a state, or a man?”

If only the people giving the ovation would ask themselves that question.

Have no doubt. That ovation could well have been covered on the Israeli nightly news or a bit in the weekend papers. Not extensively, but still, shown for a few seconds on a couple of channels. And why? Because to millions of Israelis, it’s utterly incomprehensible. A majority of Israelis (depending on the poll, it’s usually 60-75%) think it’s time for Bibi to go.

Do Jews outside Israel who support the Jewish state care what its citizens think?

October 7th was a disaster, not an event. You’d think that Jews everywhere, who care deeply about Israel, would understand that trying to rewrite history so that it’s just an “event” crosses yet another red line. You’d think that they would know that to applaud that person puts them squarely on the wrong side of history. You’d think that they would understand that to Israelis, when they give ovations like that, they’ve become part of the problem, not part of our protection—and that they’ve made Israelis feel even more alone than we already did.

You’d think a lot of things. You’d think that especially now, Israel’s “supporters” would actually care what real Israelis feel and fear.

You’d think that. But you’d be wrong.

Jewish anti-Zionists aren’t going away—how should Jewish communities respond?

According to the JFNA (Jewish Federations of North America), some 32% of American Jews between the ages of 18 and 34 define themselves as “anti-Zionist.” Essentially, a third. That number may well grow.

How should the “mainstream” Jewish community respond? Try to understand them with greater sympathy, or raise the walls higher? Remove flags from the bimah in our synagogues so these people will find our sanctuaries less off-putting, or insist that no, we are who we are? Should we abandon the word “Zionism,” because Israel has already been founded, and perhaps because it’s the “movement” terminology that surfaces the question about whether or not Israel should exist?

Rabbi Abi Dauber Sterne and Robbie Gringas, authors of the book Stories for the Sake of Argument (which we discussed on our podcast when it first came out), have begun exploring some of these issues. In a conversation we’ll air shortly, Abi explains why these two committed Zionists thought it was important to engage the anti-Zionist community, what they learned, and what they still don’t know. I suggested other angles that I hope they’ll explore as their research continues.

More on that, coming soon.

Iran menacing from the outside. Countries like Qatar, Indonesia and Turkey possibly ending up just across our border, “overseeing” Gaza in Phase II. Jewish infighting that threatens to shake the very foundations of the Jewish state.

It all sounds very current, and it is …

But all of this is also in many ways a replay of history, a chapter from Jewish history that we should know much better than we do. That’s why I thought that Professor Barry Strauss’ book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, is so important for us to know about.

Barry Strauss is one of those scholars who’s got the extraordinary ability to bring scholarship to life in writing that almost reads like non-fiction. When I read the book, several of the themes to which he returns time and again in the book struck me as surprisingly current. Is the present a replay of the past—that wouldn’t be so great. Or is the past a way for us to learn where we stumbled last time, so we don’t make the same mistakes again?

In the two-century long war with Rome that the book covers, there were three major Jewish rebellions against Rome. The one that led to the destruction of the Temple most of us know about, but what about the other two?

It’s a story filled with all sorts of issues that we see on the “front pages” of our newspapers:

* Resilience and survival: Despite their suffering catastrophic military defeats, genocide, and exile, Strauss argues that the Jewish people displayed a unique “spiritual armor.” He argues that while Rome destroyed the physical Temple, it could not destroy the Torah or the emerging rabbinic leadership, which allowed Jewish identity to survive and eventually thrive.

* Geopolitic influence: Strauss places the conflict within a broader global context, highlighting the role of the Parthian Empire (ancient Iran) as a potential ally to the Jews and a constant rival to Rome.

* Internal disunity: A major sub-argument is that Jewish infighting was as much a cause of their defeat as Roman military might. Strauss notes that during the siege of Jerusalem, rebel factions were busy fighting each other and even burning their own food supplies.

* Historical continuity: Strauss connects these ancient battles to the modern era, suggesting that the spirit of resistance and the geopolitical reality of Israel as a small state among empires remain remarkably consistent.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Barry Strauss is the Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. Strauss is a 2025 recipient of the prestigious Bradley Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Strauss is a military and naval historian with a focus on ancient Greece and Rome and their lessons for today. He is the author of nine books on ancient history, several of them bestsellers, and co-author or co-editor of several others. His latest book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, was published in August and was named one of the five best book lists of 2025.

You can find out more about Barry on his website.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

What you’ll see are two women wearing white shirts, being hurried away by police from a menacing crowd in Bnai Brak, a Haredi section of greater Tel Aviv.

What’s with the white shirts? That’s what many women soldiers wear under their uniforms.

So what happened to their uniforms? They took them off, hoping that the gathering crowd might get confused and not realize that they were the soldiers that the enraged Jews were hunting for. Why were they in danger? Because a huge, seething, menacing crowd of Haredim—who incorrectly thought the women were there to hand out draft notices—were after them.

The police came and extracted the soldiers. From Bnai Brak, right near Tel Aviv. Remember when we used to extract soldiers from some Arab village that they’d mistakenly entered over the green line? No more. Now, soldiers still aren’t safe in Arab villages, but they’re not safe in Bnai Brak either.

And the police? Note that they’re fleeing too. Not turning around and facing down the crowd. The police had weapons. Had this been Arabs, what would they have done? Perhaps, some people are asking, it’s time to spread that net wider?

Amazingly, the police (ultimately under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir) had an explanation for the violence—the army screwed up.

Main Heading (Red): The Chaos in Bnei Brak

Main Headline: Tel Aviv District Commander Accuses: “The female soldiers passed through the city without coordination”

Sub-headline: The Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Attacked: “We will not tolerate harm to soldiers” | The reactions to the riots

The blame, they said, lay with the army (and not with the marauding Haredim), because the army should have coordinated with the police before sending soldiers into Bnai Brak.

But soldiers in Israel go everywhere … to get home, to the playground with their kids at the end of the day, to the mall. What, to protect Haredi sensibilities, the IDF should get permission to enter parts of Israel?

And what about when they are there to serve draft notices. Then it will be OK for the Haredim to attack them?

You can only say that if you’ve given up on the idea of Israel as a sovereign state.

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Chili Tropper, whom we cite often in these columns, reminded his readers that this was no one-off incident, and made absolutely clear why it’s happening:

How crazy is this? To the extent that the Central District Police Commander says that “the army must coordinate its entry into the city with us.” A police commander says that IDF female soldiers need to coordinate entry into a city in the sovereign Jewish State of Israel.

How disturbed is this? To the extent that in recent months, Major General (Res.) David Zini, the Bnei Brak Brigade Commander, Avinoam Emunah, fighters from the Hasmonean Battalion, and now female soldiers have been attacked in Bnei Brak. This is absolutely not a one-time event. It is systematic anarchy.

How delusional is this? To the extent that in the name of religion, protesters set fire to a police motorcycle, overturn a patrol car, and burn tefillin and prayer books. The furthest thing from Judaism.

How extreme is this? To the extent that Haredi leaders have been commanding people for months to tear up enlistment orders, threatening to leave the country, dancing to the lyrics of the song “We will die and not enlist,” and comparing [the situation] to the Yellow Patch.

And then they wonder why female soldiers are being chased in the heart of Bnei Brak.

Many people on the political right and in religious camps came to the partial defense of the Haredim. Sure, they said, they went too far, but let’s keep things in perspective. No one was hurt; no one touched those women.

First of all, it’s quite possible that they escaped physical harm only because a few stray police officers came in to rescue them. But leaving that aside, imagine for a moment that it was your daughter, doing her job because she was called on to serve her country, facing a crowd like that. Would you say it wasn’t such a big deal at the end of day, knowing that the fear and the trauma of those endless minutes will likely stay with her for years to come?

I suspect not.

I would hope not.

The American armada assembled within striking distance of Iran is off most of the front pages in the US, but it’s most certainly not out of people’s minds here. Israelis are mixed. About 44% say they hope that Trump will attack, and many more agree that if the US does launch an attack, that Israel should join.

Almost everyone here knows that we can’t live with Iran having either nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles that can reach Israel. What’s amazing, even though people know that we’re likely to get hit badly if there’s a war, is that there’s a broad swathe of Israelis that has confidence that the army can and will do what’s needed, sooner or later, when the timing is right. And they support that, even if we get badly whacked.

Ironically, the existential threat about which most Israelis have neither confidence nor concrete suggestions is not external, but internal. It’s the Haredim who they worry might cause the state to collapse.

The Israel Democracy Institute just published (in Hebrew) a study about Haredim in Israel, Haredim in Israel 2050: Demographic Projections and Economic and Security Scenarios. In it, among much more, they illustrated varying projections of the percentage of Israel’s population that will be Haredi. There’s not a huge disparity:

In twenty-four years, about a quarter of Israel will be Haredi. If that’s really what’s about to play out, then the Palestinians just need to hold on. Some people reading this may be old enough to remember the days when Yasser Arafat would say that “the womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon.”

Babies are still the answer to their dreams, but now it’s not their babies that will make the difference. It’s ours.

The socio-economic-national contract with the Haredim is unsustainable. Everyone knows it.

The coalition knows it, too. But as even many Israeli conservatives acknowledge, to recall the days when Netanyahu was guided by what was good for Israel rather than what was good for him, you’d have to go back almost as far as Arafat’s quote. Not quite, but a long, long time.

Years of capitulation to Jewish and Israeli anti-Zionism are beginning to come home to roost.

What’s going to happen next time? What if the police don’t get there in time?

That is not a question that a functioning society should ever have to think about.

The next time you’re in Beit She’an, go to Falafel Zahava and give them a very big tip. Soldiers asked Hanouch Daum to pass this on, so why not help him do it?

“Hi Hanoch, we are a group from advanced training, Company 601 Combat Engineering, just about to get our silver berets.

We were on a culture day and and went to Bahalatz [the training base], and we stopped at Falafel Zahava in Beit She’an. 30 soldiers, and the owner didn’t let anyone pay – he opened a table [and served everyone] with such great love!

I’d be happy if you could tell the people of Israel about these righteous people and their big hearts. It gave us a lot of strength.”

As you’ll hear in our conversation with JJ Sussman today—which I invited him to have after he and I had both returned to Israel—GESHER was originally created by a now legendary Israeli educator to build bridges between religious and secular Jews. But in recent years, GESHER has expanded its work in several ways, including building relationships between Israel and the Diaspora.

Here’s part of how GESHER explains the trips:

The “Gesher to the Diaspora” course offers Israeli leaders and influencers a rare opportunity to deepen their understanding of Jewish life outside of Israel and to strengthen the bonds that unite the Jewish people. Through learning, listening, and direct encounter, participants develop a deeper sense of shared responsibility and mutual belonging between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.

The course brings together Israeli decision-makers and public influencers from across society, including local government, security and defense, media, education, and culture. Participants represent the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish life, including secular, religious, and ultra-Orthodox communities, men and women, and people from both the center and the periphery of the country.

The program culminates in a six-day visit to a Jewish community abroad, where participants meet with both professional leadership and everyday community members, visit central institutions, and engage in open and honest dialogue. The experience is supported by academic research and evaluation to ensure lasting impact.

The true measure of success is what happens after the course. Upon completion, participants become Gesher Syms Fellows, empowered to lead with empathy, courage, and vision. They return to their communities with a renewed commitment to civic engagement, bridging divides within Israeli society and strengthening Israel’s relationship with the Jewish world. To date over 500 leaders have participated in the course.

The Israelis at the dinner were fairly senior people in business, military, government and more. They were the kinds of people, I assumed, who, sure, might well have learned a lot from a trip like that, but who certainly had a fairly decent sense of American Jewry even prior to the trip.

But I was wrong. Virtually every person spoke about how little they’d known—or even thought—about Diaspora Jewry prior to the trip, how their visit to American Jewry had been a genuine wakeup-call, and how moved they were by the shared values and work of these two halves of the Jewish people. It was an evening moving and memorable far beyond what I’d anticipated, and it struck me that in this time of worry and division across the Jewish world, hearing about GESHER’s work is cause for genuine optimism and thus well worth sharing.

You can visit GESHER’s website here. We hope you enjoy our conversation with JJ Sussman.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

JJ Sussman is the International Director of Gesher. JJ has worked in Israel’s High-Tech sector for the last 18 years at firms including SanDisk, Jerusalem Global and Israel Seed Partners. JJ has always been involved in projects to help the Jewish people and was the International Director for Unity Day in its first year. He made Aliyah from New York 20 years ago and now lives in Modi’in together with his wife and six children.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

The conversations with people that I bring on to the podcast have their genesis in all sorts of ways. I read something that they wrote, somebody I know tells me, This is a fascinating person you should get to know. We meet each other at a conference or wherever. It happens in all different kinds of ways. I think this is the first one, though, that emerges from a Friday night dinner on the Upper West Side of New York. I happened to be on the Upper West Side, I guess, a couple of months ago already. I don't know when it was exactly, but a while ago, and I was invited to dinner at the home of friends of my brothers. My brother said, Oh, they're having a bunch of Israeli people over. It's some sort of Delegation. They've come to learn about American Judaism, that's all I knew, but you're welcome to come. My brother was going to go there anyway, or my sister-in-law, at least, my brother was post-surgery. I went and met these really fascinating Israelis on the delegation. And I met the person who was running the delegation for an organization which we're going to learn more about in just a minute, an organization I'm called Gesher, which means Bridge.The person who I had the privilege of re-meeting that night and sitting with today is JJ Susman, JJ is the International Director of Gesher. He made Aliyah to Israel about 30 years ago. He worked in various high tech companies, the names of many of which you would recognize for a couple of decades. He's been at Gecher for about a decade. He lives with his wife and kids in Modi'in. I wanted to talk to you, JJ, because you bring these people to America, mostly either to New York or LA, but whatever, and they're very important people. They have positions in ministries. They have very pivotal positions in very important high tech companies. They're players. They're definitely players in the Israeli system. I've always heard people say, Israelis don't really know a lot about diaspora Jews, but I always assume that you get to a certain point in Israeli society, a certain height on the ladder. Well, obviously you do because you meet people, you learn. I sat with these people. I think there were three of them that night at our dinner, each one of whom was impressive beyond words. I mean, these were really smart, smart people. And they all said to a person, I didn't know anything about American Judaism.And that's when I decided, I got to talk to you about this, because I want to hear from your vast experience of doing this now, what do you want Israelis to know about American Judaism? But perhaps even before that, what do they not know? And going through the experience that you put together for them, and you'll describe the experience, what do they leave knowing, and how does that change their attitude to diaspora Jews, to the relationship between Israel and the diaspora, perhaps a sense of responsibility to diaspora, given what's going on now? I guess later in the conversation, we should talk about whether they're picking up how much the sands are shifting under the feet of American Jews. I'm not sure American Jews know that, but we'll talk about that as a separate issue. So let's just start out. Tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us about Gesher, and then we'll dive in.So first of all, Daniel, thank you for having me on the show. It's really an honor and a privilege to be here. As you said, I made Aliyah to Israel in the late '90s. I've been here about 30 years now, or in the mid '90s, I guess I made Aliyah. I worked in high tech, and now I've been at Gesher for about a decade. Gesher is an organization that's been around for over 50 years, trying to bring together the secular and the religious and even the Haredi communities, trying to build a cohesive society here in Israel.Was founded by a really special person.Was founded by rabbi Dr. Daniel Tropper, who he in his own right is a special person, but today may be more recognized by his son, who is a former Minister in the government, Hili Tropper, and today is still a member of the Knesset. And about a decade ago, Gesher made a strategic decision to evolve from a strictly educational organization to one focused also on social impact. And to that end, established something we call today the Gesher Leadership Institute. And the goal of that program is to work with influential leaders in Israeli society, people who have influence, like you mentioned, director, generals of ministries or mayors or senior journalists, people who have really outsized influence on the public discourse in Israel and more than public discourse, educational leaders in Israeli society, and to work with them so that when they go back to their positions of influence, they can take the values that we've tried to impart to them and really spread them forward. So you have them act as social change agents in their positions of influence.What are those values that you're trying to impart to them?So the values of cohesive society. And then a decade ago, when we started this program where we bring them together for a course, which includes beyond the trip you mentioned, the delegation you mentioned, which is about a week long trip to a Jewish community outside of Israel. It includes also about 30 hours worth of time together here in Israel, where we learn about diaspora Jewry, where we learn about the different fault lines and issues tearing Israelis apart here as well. And getting back to the issue we want to talk about, diaspora Jewry. Like you said, they really know nothing. And I was also flabbergasted and blown away in the beginning when we started doing this. How little they know. But if you think about it, it makes sense. Israelis, when they learn about Jews outside of Israel in the school system here, in the educational system, it's about the Holocaust.Diaspora Jewish history ends in 1948 in most Israeli textbooks.Exactly. From Tanakh to the Shoah, I think. But even more than that, when they travel in their positions of influence, they're traveling either for business reasons or for governmental reasons or for Hasbara reasons. And They're usually the ones giving the talk. They're the highlight at a talk or at a lecture, and people are coming to hear them talk. What's incredibly unique about our program, I believe, is that we teach them to listen, to not talk, to pay attention, to learn. They're going to learn about the Jewish communities to which they're going, the American Jewish community, like you said, whether in New York or Washington or Los Angeles or even Boston and Detroit we've been to. And for them, as most of your listeners have probably met with Israeli, too, in their lifetime, That is not a simple task to sit and listen and to talk about it. And what we do is after they hear the speaker, whether the speaker is from the ADL or from APAC or a leader in a community or rabbi, after each day, We sit together with the group, and the groups are cohorts of about 15 to 20 at a time, and they, too, come from various disciplines and various backgrounds. So some of them are religious or secular. And that's where the excitement happens. That's where the discussions about what they just heard. That's where they start really figuring out what they heard and argue with one another about what the implications of what they heard really are.Okay. So give us a sense. I mean, you said you were flabbergasted. I wasn't flabbergasted. I was just surprised, but I didn't get into the weeds with them the way that you do. But give me a sense of what do they not know that you would have thought they would have known when you started the job, that they are no longer surprises that you don't know, that they don't know. What do they not know? And then how do you go about having them learn whatever that thing is?They don't know a lot. They don't know the different denominations. They don't know what reformed Jews are here. Reform Jews are considered a curse word, basically, or a derogatory term here.By non-reformed people we should be saying. There's a flourishing reform from Judaism. I just want to make sure that everybody understands. But reforming in the government circles means people that aren't serious about Judaism, which is totally absurd.Right. But that's exactly the point. It's not just by the religious, by the secular, too. The secular sometimes travel to America and expect to meet their colleagues and their counterparts who they think are these reform Jews who we're meeting with. And they don't realize that the reform Jews are really religious Jews. They go to synagogue. And for a secular Jew here, they have many, I'm Actually generalizing it, where many have built up such an anti to anything religious that they have a hard time or takes them a while to find that common ground, even with those non-Orthodox denominations of Judaism in America. And beyond that, just the pace of change that we lived through over this last decade around the world, but let's focus on the Israel-American relationship, is incredible and really just incredibly fast. When we started doing this thing, it was just a year or two before the Kotel compromise, if you remember.You know, blessed memory.Which I would say many of the professional Jews dealt with, but didn't really have to do with the general Jewish community there. Then we went to COVID, which for everybody was a time of, a time. Then we had the judicial reform issue, which people on both sides of the ocean were very, very engaged in. Then we went straight into October 7th. October 7th had extremely significant ramifications for us here in Israel, but also for the Jews in America. Sometimes Sometimes similar, sometimes very different. But we were so engrossed, and we continue to be so engrossed in everything that happens to us in the here and now, that we don't spend time thinking about what's going on to our brothers and sisters on the other side of the ocean. I think just going there back and forth is so critical to let one another know that we really are part of one big family.Okay, so I want to come back to October 7th and post October 7th in a minute. But let's just say before October 7th. They didn't know anything about denominations. They didn't understand that reform is actually sophisticated take on what Judaism is, and it has a whole set of beliefs and practices and synagogues and people who are devoted to it. Okay, so denominational stuff they didn't know before October 7th. Again, what other kinds of things about American Jewish life did they not know? I'm sure they didn't know very much about American Jewish history. I mean, did they know when the Jews came to America? Did they know how many Jews there were in America? Did they know that there was a Western European immigration, then an Eastern European immigration, and then a a Russian immigration, then an Iranian? Do they know that stuff?The answer in one is no. But that's why we spend the time before we travel to really learn a lot of that context and a lot of that history. And the time when we're actually on the ground, we try to meet those people and meet what's going on in the today and now. But it goes to politics. They don't know that 70-ish percent of the American Jewish community vote Democrat and not Republican. Certainly when you have a Prime Minister here who's been in power for 15 years, more aligned with the Republican Party, that to them is a surprise. But I would say that if I put into a sentence what they really learn, all of them, is that to be Jewish in America, you have to invest in your Jewishness. To be Jewish in Israel, it's in the air. The busses say Shana Tova. Their kids are off on the Jewish holidays automatically. They don't recognize, certainly don't appreciate how much someone in America to be Jewish needs to invest in their Judaism, whether it's being a member of a JCC, whether it's sending their kids to a Jewish school or a Jewish camp. Every day they wake up and they have to decide actively to be Jewish and to pursue their Jewishness, which is incredibly different than living here in Israel.Now, here's a question that maybe is an unfair question. When they come back from having seen that, you can't just go to public school and assume that there's going to be Tanakh and Uditzitz, whatever. Does it make them more bullish or less bullish about the communities that they visit? Do they say, Wow, these people are amazing. They have done all this stuff and look what they've managed to do. Or do they say, Wow, these people are amazing. Look at all the investment. But how long can this be sustained? Because it's not in the air. How long can you as a 3%, 2.5% of the population? So does it leave them feeling that the diaspora is strong or does it leave them feeling that there's something relative to Israel that's very, I don't know, fragile about diaspora Jewish existence.So like I said, we take 15 to 20 people on each of these cohorts, and they'll come back with answers along the spectrum, which range from, I would say, oh, my God, this pluralism of expression of Judaism in America is so beautiful. If I only had that in my community here in Israel, I'd be so much more connected to my own Jewish identity. So that's one end of the spectrum. The other end is the numbers are proving that, look at the conservative movement is dwindling and the reformed Jews are, I, as a religious Jew, let's say, know that by performing my mitzvah, my rituals, I'm going to sustain the Jewish people. Here in another generation or two, there'll be fewer and fewer of people committed to their Judaism, and not just the Judaism, to the Jewish people because of the rate of assimilation and intermarriage and the like. But I'll give you one story. I remember the day we landed in Los Angeles on one of our delegations, and we met with a senior member of the Jewish community in Los Angeles. And again, the group was made up of religious and secular members. And the first sentence he said is that, I used to view intermarriage as a threat, and today I view it as an opportunity.That was his sentence of the American community leader. If you're a religious Jew and you hear that sentence, you're saying, Where did I just show up? What's going on here? His point was that I think the way the American Jewish community relates to the children of mixed marriages today is significantly different than they related to them even 10 years ago, and certainly 20 or 30 years ago, where they wrote them off. And today, there's much more of an engagement with them. But just that sentence alone, I think, throws an Israeli who's grown up in this world of, even the shul I don't daven in as an Orthodox shul for the most part, hearing a sentence like that is really mind-blowing. And okay, let me learn more about what's really going on.And is their instinct to say, My God, you're off your rocker, or is there instinct to say, I've never thought about things that way. Let me hear more.Here's where we call it the attention muscle, the listening muscle. We tell them, you're going to hear some things which are very, very difficult to hear. Our goal, is to listen. It's not to challenge the people we're listening to. That we do, again, amongst our own group, from everything. Certainly, you can ask questions to clarify or to get a better understanding. But that within the group became a big question and fault line, again, between the different worldviews that existed within our group. And again, as the week went by, we met with reformed Jews, we met with conservative Jews, we met with Orthodox Jews, we met with Haredi Jews. We were in Hollywood on that particular on that particular delegation. And we even spend time in people's homes for Friday night dinner. There was a story we had in New York. I remember we were on the Upper West Side again, where I met you. So it was a different dinner in a different family's home. And we had a secular journalist who was a guest at the family on the Upper West Side, a modern Orthodox family towards the liberal side. And we were already at the stage where we had been hosted the night before at a very wealthy family his home, and they were starting to make cynical jokes about how wealthy the American Jewish community is and how different it is from us in Israel. Here he went out Friday dinner, and he came back and shared with the rest of the group his experience. He said that, We've been making fun of these upper West Side, 'faltzanim' was the word he used in Hebrew.Braggards, yeah, like showy.Then he said, They washed their hands, and before they washed their hands, they started singing Shalom Aleichem. In their heavy American accents, they were singing these words before Kiddush, and he had no idea what they were singing. He didn't know the words. He felt that he had been robbed of some his Jewish identity in Israel, where people all the way on the other side of the world were singing this thing, and he just had no idea from a cultural standpoint, not even a religious standpoint, had no idea what was going on. And that to him, I think, really inspired him to learn more about his own Jewish identity and write his own Jewish story, if you will.Okay, so that's fascinating, right? I mean, an Israeli who doesn't know what Shalom Aleichem is and hasn't heard it or whatever. You have one person who goes out and says to them, I see intermarriage as an opportunity, which, of course, is the precise opposite. Even I think among reformed Jews in Israel would not say that they see intermarriage as an opportunity. That's a very non-Israeli perspective. And that's a perspective of somebody who is 3% of the population, not 80% of the population. You have people that say, Okay, I went to a family's house and whatever. I thought of them, I thought of them. But I have no idea what that was. And that reminds me that I grew up in Israel for X number of decades. Learned nothing. I mean, really, basically learned nothing. Other moments that come to mind when you just were shocked by either how different what they heard about American Jewish life was or how little they knew. I want to move on to a post October 7th in a minute, but just a couple more general?You mentioned the whole immigration story and how American jury came about and to its current state of of, I guess, prominence, if you will. The whole federation set up of federations, what they are, why they exist, who they exist for, is just a tremendous amount of ignorance, I would say. I think that's really the key point. There is a tremendous amount of ignorance. Like I said earlier, they don't learn about it in schools. When they travel, they're traveling for very specific purposes and not to learn about it. When we started this, our goal, like I said earlier with Gesher, was to evolve into a social impact organization, to work with leaders in Israeli society. This wasn't our goal, initially. Our goal was to take Israelis out of Israel so that we can have all the labels drop and work around internal Israeli society. What we quickly realized is that nobody else was dealing with this. I would say this is now 10 or 12 years ago. Early on, there are now a few other organizations taking these types of delegations to do it. But we were certainly early on, and there was a vacuum. There was a vacuum, both in organizations doing this, but more so in the knowledge base of these prominent Israelis, like you said. You see it with politicians who go and try to speak in English and say grandmiser. It just shows you they can be the smartest people in the world, but their horizons are only as far as the Hebrew language goes. That particular minister, I know for a fact, traveled for his first time there only once he was in government to America, walked into, again, a liberal American synagogue and I've never been, never seen one. It wasn't through one of our programs. But it's that same experience that happens again and again and again and again with leaders who you shared the Friday night table with just a few weeks ago.So now let's turn October 7th. Obviously, everything changes here. The world is turned upside down. All of our assumptions about security, about everything. I mean, this country completely changes on October 7th, but life changes very dramatically and not for the better. For American Jews also. The Israeli Jews now that you've taken to America over the course of the last two years and a few months since October 7th. Now, there's a lot of Israelis who go and tell their stories, right? And there's a lot of Israelis who, I mean, thank God, the ones who came out alive, the hostages, many hostages, are going back and forth and telling their stories. And they're very much in demand as well, they should be, because there's just nothing like hearing it from the actual person who went through it, especially if you don't have access to the Israeli press, which covers it in much greater depth than the English press can. So again, those are really critically important presentations and meetings between American Jewish audiences and hostages and hostages' families and so on and so forth. But I want to put that aside. What have they learned about what's happened to American Jews post October 7th? And what surprised them about it? How did it leave them feeling differently about American Jews than they had before they went on these trips?So it's I'll tell you, one of the leaders who we had participated in one of our programs before October 7th was a chief education officer in the IDF. He was one of those guys who came back and said, I can't believe how much the American Jewish community invests in their Jewishness. This is such an incredible learning experience for me, and I want to be able to impart that experience to a much greater pool of people whom I can influence. In Israel. In the IDF. And that's exactly what you said. You didn't ask, but I'll answering the question is what happens to these people once they get back to Israel, our leaders who participate in this program. And we have a whole team working with them to try to implement these projects in their spheres of influence. And this particular individual, I'll fast forward a few steps of how we got there, but basically, we've now partnered with the IDF and some other partners to run similar delegations for IDF officers at the rank of a major to go to experience a Jewish community outside of Israel. It's a program which because of the war, took a little bit longer than we had hoped to get off the ground.But what's happened since the war, we've taken, I think, about six or so, and then there are 60 officers at a time. So these are big delegations, is that we're meeting an American Jewish community who is incredibly embracing these soldiers, these officers, who are thirsting for this connection to these heroes who were on the front lines. And that's on the American side. On the Israeli side, These heroes are literally coming from one day in Gaza, the next day they're with us in Ben Gurion Airport, and they're participating in a Kabbalat Shabbat on the steps in an elementary school in New York, and see 500 kids singing songs for them, singing Akhinu, making them feel like heroes. And they had no idea. They had no idea that the world is so engaged in every, the Jewish world, obviously, the engaged, pro-Israel Jewish world, is so engaged are saying prayers for them and are singing for them. And they come back and they say, this is an exact quote from one of the officers who participated in this program, I went thinking I was a soldier for the state of Israel, and I came back recognizing that I'm a soldier for the Jewish people worldwide.Now, what that does for an IDF major who's roughly 30 years old, I mean, anywhere between 20 and 35, roughly, is tremendous. He realizes, and I give that example because it just happened recently, but also because it's representative of all these people. The goal You ask what the goal is. The goal is to when we say we, we don't just mean we, the state of Israel. I mean, we, the Jewish people. We, the Jewish people is half of the Jewish people are here in Israel, half the Jewish people are outside of Israel, the majority of them in the American Jewish communities. And that is something which since October 7th, I would say two things have happened. Either you have Jews who have been incredibly more showing up to their Jewish things, whether it be a Friday night dinner or, again, a federation. This we've seen, by the way, since we've taken the trips, we were at Federation. New York Federation showed that they had an incredible amount of new donors to Federation, first-time donors, subsequent to October 7th, to the number of 30,000 or so new donors, first-time donors, or an organization called One Table, which does Friday night dinners. The number of seats around the Friday night dinner tables for them spiked and has continued to spike since October 7th. You definitely have that surge of people searching for their Jewish identity and searching for their Jewish Jewishness. And then another part, I think, who are, because of the rise in anti-Semitism, because of the costs of outwardly being Jewish, are shying away and are probably not showing up. But those aren't the people we meet because they're shying away and not showing up.But some people are probably showing up not only because of what happened in Israel, but because they may be showing up because of the anti-Semitism. I mean, the Israelis have a part. Look, what happened on October 7th. We always believe that progroms were a European thing. We're going to have soldiers get killed, obviously, and we're going to lose Jews in terrorist, it's not going to be perfect here. There's going to be very high costs. But the idea that non-Jews can come in and slaughter Jews by the hundreds at will and do unspeakable things that we're not even going to mention. We said, That's progroms. That's why Zionism came into the picture. We left that behind, and it turns out we didn't leave that behind. It can happen here, and it did happen here. And pray to God, it never, ever again happens. But whatever. So there's a in which we lost a bit of a sense of optimism or security about ourselves. American Jews have also lost a certain sense of certainty and security. And I think it's actually become even greater. And I want to come back to the Mamdani thing in a minute.But we're seeing, I We're seeing people saying things. A Candice Owens, who has been normalized in part of the Republican Party. A Nick Fuentes, who's been normalized in part of the Republican Party. A Tucker Carlson, who is normalizing him doesn't get you thrown out of the Heritage Foundation. And on the same time, on the left, people also saying just, I mean, horrible, horrible, horrible things about Jews. To the Israelis who are now coming, are they hearing about this also? Are they sensing that this is a community in crisis? Or are the people that they're meeting with from the American side don't believe that it's a crisis, and so therefore, they're not saying it's a crisis?Definitely sensing it's a crisis. I mean, we meet with the ADL, for example, who've shown us, the thing is, I participate in all these trips, but each Israeli is coming for the first time. To say that the participants hear this and see the evolution of it from trip to trip would be incorrect. Certainly, as myself, someone who goes in for each trip every few months, I've seen the numbers go up. And again, the numbers of anti-Semitism were pre-October 7th, but the spike since October 7th is incredibly scary to see. So the Israelis who come in absolutely see an American Jewish community who is taking these things very seriously and who are in a different state than they were pre-October 7th. Absolutely.Is that a sociological insight or do they come back feeling, we as a Jewish state, these people are in trouble over there, and we have an obligation to help them.The first trip we took after the war, the first allegation we took after the war, there were two participants who never met with one another. One was the head of the Unit 8200, the famous intelligence unit in Israel, the Alumni Association of that unit. And another one is the head of an organization called Generative AI for Good, a social good organization. And they met there for the first time. They met with the ADL, they met with family It was, again, it was a year, I think it was at some point after the war, not the first few months, but sometime after that. They came back and said, We have to do something, and we have to use our combined talents to do something. What they did was they tried, they set up a conference called Hack the Hate, where they were going to try to leverage Israel's high tech community here in Israel to come together and think of ways to help curb the anti-Semitism that was rising drastically. They were able to secure the government's arm of combating anti-Semitism, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, and combating anti-Semitism to also come in as a partner.Their conference, they thought, what did get about 50 people was hosted in Microsoft's offices. They had 250 people, and there were people still waiting online to come in. And they subsequently have had now a second conference in New York as well. And that all stemmed from the fact that they didn't know how bad it was. And they went on this delegation, and that to them was really the issue that they wanted to work on when they came back. So absolutely. And that's, again, just one anecdote. Another one is Miriam Peretz, who, the Israel Prize winner, was on our delegation a bunch of years ago already. And we've worked with her through our alumni, through our fellows network for years now. Just a month ago, after a lot of hard work together with senior educational leaders who were also gone through our courses in our delegation, we put together a global Zionist Youth Conference, bringing together youth from outside of Israel together with youth within Israel, about 350 youth gathered together in Budapest, where Herzl was born.High school kids age?High school kids age, exactly. 11th and 12th graders, mostly, in Budapest, where Herzel was born, to reenact the youth conference and to come together and work together. It's so I think these days, because we're both going through significant challenges, both here in Israel and in the American Jewish community, to pull our efforts and to work together and recognize that we're not such a big family, and we really need to stay together and pull our efforts to work with one another from across each side of the ocean, both adults and also the youth.Last question in terms of this progression of time we talked about before October 7th, the general stuff that we talked after October 7th. I was just remembering as you were talking, you and I had that dinner. I attended your dinner I guess, is a better way of saying it.We both attended a gracious house dinner.Okay, fair enough. Very well said. The Friday night after Mamdani was elected. Mamdani was elected three days earlier. Now I still remember because I was only there for a week, so I know what happened during that week. Now, we're a couple of months, I guess, a month-ish, post all of that, a little bit more. Do you have an agenda for the people who come to try to learn something about the political travail that Americans are facing in the hopes that Israelis will do something about it? Do you have an agenda that will learn about it in hopes that Israelis will at least just be more knowledgeable and sensitive? Or is your sense that they should know about it because your intelligent people should know things, but fundamentally, there's not a hell of a lot that we can really expect Israelis to be able to do to help American Jews who are navigating really uncharted waters in American political and cultural life here. What's the institutional Geshar hope for what these Israelis are going to come back with in a post-Mamdani era?So it's a very fine line, first of all. I think it's not just in the post-Mamdani era, but also in the post-Mamdani era. I think for Israelis to come in, certainly if they're only coming in for a week, to come back and say, We know better or we can do better. And even if you're the Israeli government to say that we can do better. We've met with plenty of Jewish communal leaders across the spectrum who say, Thank you for caring. Thank you for listening. We've built up this community for the last hundreds of years. Certainly love some help, but stay shy of telling us what we need to do. And it only hurts in some cases. On university campuses, for example, if you have a club that starts getting funding from the Israelis or from the Israeli government, that could hurt the situation. And we can't assume to know better than they know many, many things. Certainly from so far away, we have a view that when you're in it, you don't have. And I think we can share our thoughts, but it's very, very fine line and patronizing if we come in and say that we know better and we can do better.When it comes to, again, stopping anti-Semitism is the hottest issue right now, I would say on the table, we can certainly lend our know-how and our online expertise or the high tech expertise or security know-how and offer that help, but really be cognizant to the fact that they're incredibly smart, engaged Jewish professionals who are dealing with these issues and have themselves a very sensitive time ahead of them. But knowing that we care and showing up for them and being there for them is incredibly important. To answer your question in a very secure at this route, the first step is just learning about it and trying to understand it. From there, we do hope that our participants take some responsibility. How that responsibility expresses itself, I think, is different in every case.Well, because they're different people and they have different kinds of jobs. So last question. You obviously work with the Israelis. I mean, you're one the leaders of Gesher, and Gesher is bringing Israelis to America. Israelis who don't know a lot about American Judaism to come across the ocean to learn more. I wouldn't say necessarily a lot in a week, but learn a hell of a lot more than they knew.They learn a lot.Yeah. I mean, a week is a long time if you're a smart person and you're inundated, for sure. So I know that you don't officially work with the American leaders that you meet with or the families that you meet with or whatever, because they're just basically making themselves available to your delegation. But you're an American guy. You grew up in New York. Your English is mellifluous, and you talk to them a lot. What do you think, when they say goodbye to these delegations, they're hoping? Do they say, Okay, I mean, JJ Sussman asked me to meet with them. I met with them. I didn't show up late. I didn't have a stain on my tie. I did my job. Or is it more than that? When they wave goodbye and say, thank you for coming. We really appreciate your being here. When they're driving home, what do you think they would like to see Israeli leaders like the ones that you're bringing do?So I think these are very senior people who we're meeting with also, the people with whom we're meeting. And they also have agendas, and they also want to get their messages back into Israel. So I'll just give you an example from the group that earlier in the week when I met you, we were in Washington, and one of the leaders, a very prominent liberal Jewish American. She said that it's very hard to love a country that doesn't love you back. And for her, it was very important to get that message across. That as a liberal Jew in America, when she comes to Israel and is made not to feel comfortable in various ways, she, as a professional Jewish communal leader, is working day and night on Jewish causes. Yet when it comes to feeling loved by the Israeli establishment, she doesn't feel that love. I'll go to a Federation leader with whom we meet sometimes who said what I mentioned earlier, Tell your government, thank you for offering that help. But in many cases, we don't want their help because it only makes our job harder. So they have agendas also. I will say, though, and this I can tell you now because we're in December when we're recording this, I've sent end of the year thank you to many of the people that we meet, because like you said, they make their time available.And these are very, very important people on the other side of the ocean. And most of them do it without asking for anything in return. And for many of them, it's a highlight. It's a highlight of their year to meet with such a high a global group of Israelis and to really have an open and honest conversation. Almost all of the discussions are off the record. So they feel very, very comfortable sharing what they really believe and being able to share what their organization does or what they do and to share their thoughts. For many of them, it's a real, real highlight of their everyday job, which is oftentimes fighting in the trenches, to meet with such a great group of Israelis.That's super helpful. I'll just share with you now that at this recent Republican Party, conference that there just was, there's a whole blue blood there, the issue of the USS Liberty came up, which is really completely irrelevant to anything that happened in 1967. People brought it up really as a, it was more like a trolling than anything else. What did Charlie Kirk say about the USS Liberty? Whatever. The only point that I made is that a dear friend of mine from the States sent me that conversation. He didn't write this, but this is what he was trying to say. He was trying to say, It's even 60 years ago, and the crap that you guys do, it comes back to haunt us, even more than a half a century later. He didn't say that, but I know him well enough to know why he sent me the email. He's a smart, smart guy and a deeply committed Jew and a deeply committed to Israel, but he has this attitude that you guys are always just messing things up for us. I wrote him back, whatever I wrote him back to say about the liberty, and I told him to read Michael Lauren's book about the liberty and so on and so forth.But I think that in this era in which we sense that the agendas of the two communities, each of which is hurting in its own ways, the agenda is somehow being pulled apart. The work that you and your colleagues at Gesher are doing is an exception to what we think the prevailing rule is. I would have to imagine that most of the people listening to this didn't know about the work that Gesher is doing, didn't know that these very senior Israelis are coming to America on a regular basis. They're saying a little, but listening a lot. This, I think, gives tremendous hope that some of what they're hearing from rank and file people at Friday night dinners, but also from very well positioned senior leaders of all different sorts, will hopefully come and begin to influence the way that we hear in Israel talk about diaspora Jews. I think if anything's clear, we need each other now. We need each other very, very badly. I used the image of the family before. Families do have issues. Every family has issues. I mean, not mine, not yours, of course, right? But most Other families have issues.That's why we were both at a Friday night dinner table somewhere else. But families of all different sorts have issues. The question is, how does one look them right in the eye and try to address them? I think the work that you and your colleagues are doing is just really critical to that. I bet a lot of people listening today did not even know that that work is being done and feel very appreciative for what you do.So thank you. Thank you very much, Daniel, for those words and for having me here today. Let me maybe just conclude with one of my colleagues or board members even has a great line, I think, which really states clearly what we're trying to do, that these delegations and these courses expand the prism of Jewish history for these Israeli participants from 77 years to 3,000 years. And once you do that, you have to feel part of something much greater than just the borders of the state of Israel. And you start saying we, you really do start meaning we, the Jewish people, and not just we here in the state of Israel.And at this point in our history, nothing could probably be more important than that. So for what you all do, deepest thanks. And thanks again, JJ Sussman, for taking the time to have this conversation.Thank you.

With Iran and Israel very much back in the news, a different look at the massive crisis in which the Ayatollahs find themselves. Their economy has collapsed and people cannot afford to live, but to make matters worse, in cities like Teheran, there is hardly any water. The country has largely dried up.

What many of us never knew or have forgotten is that this is largely a crisis of their own making, a result of their own ideologically rooted hate. Israel, it turns out, built Iran a very sophisticated water system back in the days of the Shah. But the system was tainted by its “Israeliness.” The mullahs wanted nothing to do with Israeli engineers or even Iranian engineers who had been trained by Israel—and ultimately left themselves with no know-how, and now, no water.

It’s a sad but telling part of the story of Iran’s demise, one with an ironic Israeli side to it. We learn about it from Seth Siegel, author of the best-selling Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Seth M. Siegel is an American businessman, writer, and activist. He is the author of the 2015 New York Times Best Seller, Let There Be Water: Israel's Solution for a Water-Starved World. He has also founded or co-founded several companies including, The Beanstalk Group and Sixpoint Partners. Additionally, Siegel has produced shows for Broadway and television, and his essays and articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others.

He attended Cornell University, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1974. After graduate studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Siegel returned to New York where he earned a Juris Doctor degree from Cornell Law School.

In 2015, St. Martin’s Press published Siegel’s book, Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World, which detailed the ways in which Israel successfully implemented water management and conservation policies despite its arid climate. Let There Be Water became a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post best seller and has appeared in multiple foreign-language editions.

During the weeks of January 25th and February 1st, I will be out of the country, and for most of that time, in an area with literally zero connectivity. We will, of course, continue to provide our podcasts for paid subscribers and previews of those podcasts for free subscribers, but there will be fewer other posts.

In the event that there is a dramatic development in Israel (Iran, Gaza or anything else) and we do not post about it, it’s because we may well not even know about it, and even if news does each us, we will definitely not have the connectivity needed to post.

We’ll return to a normal pace and schedule the week of February 8th.

With prayers for quiet and good news ….

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

The Ayatollahs have been in control for so long, and Iran’s leadership has been determined to destroy Israel for so many decades, that it can be hard to remember that matters were once very different. El Al had regular non-stop flights to Teheran.

What even fewer people know is that Iran’s present water crisis, which has contributed to the civil unrest of recent months, is in large measure a result of their destroying the water system that Israel built for them. We hear more about Israel and Iran and their water relationship from Seth Siegel, the author of the best-selling Let There Be Water.

That’s coming on Wednesday.

When I was a kid living in Israel for a couple of years, my parents (ahem) “strongly encouraged” me to join Tzofim, the scouts movement, to facilitate my becoming more Israeli, sooner. I’m not sure that it worked, but I was definitely the exception. For a huge swathe of Israeli kids, youth movements—scouts or one of the other numerous options—is even today a defining dimension of Israeli identity formation.

But what about outside Israel? If you’ve moved to the States, either for a while or permanently, and you want your kids to have a place to speak Hebrew outside the home and you want them to have an Israeli “chevre” to grow up with, what are your options? Turns out, Tzofim has thought of that, too.

Until relatively recently, I had no idea that Israelis scouts were active in the US and in other countries across the globe. To learn more, we invited two high school seniors in Newton MA, both of whom are in Tzofim, to tell us more about it.

As you’ll hear, Tzofim has had a different impact on each of them. But for both, it has been a home and a safe Israeli space, all the more important after October 7 and the reactions the war evoked in their schools.

Today, an informal conversation with Shira Argov and Tomer Melamoud to learn more about the Israeli “zone” for Israeli kids not living in Israel.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Shira Argov is a senior in high school at Milton Academy and Tomer Melamoud is a senior in high school at Newton North High School.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

During the weeks of January 25th and February 1st, I will be out of the country, and for most of that time, in an area with literally zero connectivity. We will, of course, continue to provide our podcasts for paid subscribers and previews of those podcasts for free subscribers, but there will be fewer other posts.

In the event that there is a dramatic development in Israel (Iran, Gaza or anything else) and we do not post about it, it’s because we may well not even know about it, and even if news does each us, we will definitely not have the connectivity needed to post.

We’ll return to a normal pace and schedule the week of February 8th.

With prayers for quiet and good news ….

Jeremy recently reach out and asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed on his podcast, which he hosts on the J-Street Substack. I agreed, because despite our differences, I think it’s important we all hear points of view with which we don’t agree—because that’s what gets us thinking.

Jeremy and his colleagues also graciously agreed for us to share this conversation on Israel from the Inside. (Because the conversation is technically J-Street’s, we’re not including a transcript for this particulate podcast.) The conversation is available to everyone on the YouTube below, hosted on J-Street’s YouTube channel.

My thanks to Jeremy and to Ilan Goldenberg for yet another opportunity for us to challenge each other, hopefully making us all just a bit less certain of our own positions.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

During the weeks of January 25th and February 1st, I will be out of the country, and for most of that time, in an area with literally zero connectivity. We will, of course, continue to provide our podcasts for paid subscribers and previews of those podcasts for free subscribers, but there will be fewer other posts.

In the event that there is a dramatic development in Israel (Iran, Gaza or anything else) and we do not post about it, it’s because we may well not even know about it, and even if news does each us, we will definitely not have the connectivity needed to post.

We’ll return to a normal pace and schedule the week of February 8th.

With prayers for quiet and good news ….

“There are no hostages in Gaza” was what everyone said when it was announced that he’d been located. No living hostages. No hostages who’d been taken from Israel alive and then murdered in cold blood. No bodies of those who’d been killed in Israel and dragged into Gaza. And no remains of soldiers like Hadar Goldin, z’l, whose family waited more than a decade to be able to bury their son and brother.

There’s nothing to say, at least at this moment, that captures the enormity of the relief, relief that is coupled to a deep and abiding sadness and ache.

So today, instead of words, a few images that have had Israel in their grips these past few days.

In the video at the top,

soldiers singing Hatikvah after Ran Gvili had been found, with the IDF Chief of Staff on the right saluting him.

Photos of the search released by the IDF

A graphic stunning for its beauty and creativity

It reads, obviously, 26.1.26 (January 26 2026), with the yellow hostage ribbon having morphed, at least in part, into a dove.

The white lettering at the bottom says

The first to go out [to defend the state], the last to return Rav Gvili is home.

And finally, one last video of the soldiers who searched for him

In the background, you can see the blue canopies/tents that were used for identifying bodies that were found, the gigantic excavators used in the search, and, of course, some of the ruins of Gaza.

The words of the song, which virtually every Israeli knows, are taken from Maimonides. They are the 12th of his 13 Principle of Faith, and read:

I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah I believe And even though he may tarry, Still, I will wait for him, I will wait for him every day, that he should come.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

During the weeks of January 25th and February 1st, I will be out of the country, and for most of that time, in an area with literally zero connectivity. We will, of course, continue to provide our podcasts for paid subscribers and previews of those podcasts for free subscribers, but there will be fewer other posts.

In the event that there is a dramatic development in Israel (Iran, Gaza or anything else) and we do not post about it, it’s because we may well not even know about it, and even if news does each us, we will definitely not have the connectivity needed to post.

We’ll return to a normal pace and schedule the week of February 8th.

With prayers for quiet and good news ….

“Our greatest generation,” Israelis are calling this generation of young people, “the new founding generation.”

From those heroic hours in which people saved others, whom they often didn’t even know, from near certain death at the Nova, to the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who served in Gaza and in the North, often at grievous cost, to the many thousands of civilians who already by the afternoon of Shabbat, October 7, had begun to set up civilian command centers, to the young reservists who are founding political parties to afford Israel a new start—it seems there’s no need that many young Israelis are not determined to fill.

Today, we hear about yet another angle, from two young Israelis who realized that Israeli souls had to be saved not only at the Nova, not only in Gaza, not only in the hospitals or recovery units, but far away from home, in India.

What happens when a person travels to India on their proverbial post-army trip and only there experiences symptoms of PTSD? What if the symptoms are so severe that they can’t even figure out how to get home? What if someone else knows they’re in trouble—to whom can they turn?

Enter HA-MAKOM, “The Place.”

Yet another story of Israeli love and care, creativity and devotion—yet another expression of the Israeli sense that we’re all responsible for each other.

For more information about Ha-Makom we invite you to visit their website, here.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Tamar Friedman is a military mental health officer (Kabanit) in the reserves, social worker, rescuer, tour guide, and a musician.

Hezi Shohat is a trauma social worker, search and rescue specialist, and reserve Company Commander.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

During the weeks of January 25th and February 1st, I will be out of the country, and for most of that time, in an area with literally zero connectivity. We will, of course, continue to provide our podcasts for paid subscribers and previews of those podcasts for free subscribers, but there will be fewer other posts.

In the event that there is a dramatic development in Israel (Iran, Gaza or anything else) and we do not post about it, it’s because we may well not even know about it, and even if news does each us, we will definitely not have the connectivity needed to post.

We’ll return to a normal pace and schedule the week of February 8th.

With prayers for quiet and good news ….

This week, as we mentioned on Monday, we’re looking at democracy from two different perspectives, through the eyes of two different scholars. One is an Israeli, while one is an American who often teaches in Israel. One studies Israel, while the other studies Russia and the United States. But the cracks in democracy to which they each point are chillingly similar. We hope that by hearing them both in the same week, our readers and listeners will find themselves musing not just on what is happening in Israel, but on how what is happening in Israel is a mirror of much of the West.

On Monday, we heard from Professor Yaniv Roznai. Today, we learn from Professor Jeffrey Kopstein.

When I glance up at the shelve of books immediately above my desk, of which these are a small smattering, two things become clear:

* First, many of us understand that something profound—and disturbing—is happening to the ways in which our countries are governed.

* Second, we’re not entirely sure what that “something” is.

Another volume recently got added to that ever-expanding shelf of “what the hell is really going on?” books, and I thought it was extraordinary.

In The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein argue that what we should worry might replace democracy is not “authoritarianism”, but rather, something they call “patrimonialism.”

Their book is largely about Putin’s Russia and Trump’s United States, but Israel and Netanyahu also figure. As I read the book, it struck me that Hanson and Kopstein’s thesis is perhaps the best explanation I’ve read so far of the reasons and coherence behind what we’re witnessing in Israel.

I reached out to Professor Kopstein, who in addition to his position at the University of California has had a long relationship with Hebrew University in Jerusalem, as well, and asked him to talk us through their thesis.

One we hear him, a lot—including about the United States and Israel, but really about much more—begins to make a lot of sense. It might not make us happy, but it will certainly leave us with a better understanding of the changes all of our countries are experiencing, and why.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Jeffrey Kopstein is Dean’s Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine.

In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, antisemitism, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society. These interests are central topics in his latest books, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2018), Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2023), and The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers our Future (Polity, 2024).

Professor Kopstein’s writings also appear in outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and The Washington Post.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

We begin this week with Professor Yaniv Roznai, one of Israel’s leading jurists. His recent book, coauthored with Noam Gordon, is Democracy in Retreat: Populism, Polarization and the Judicial Overhaul.

In their book, Roznai and Gordon argue that democracy is not usually lost through sudden coups, but through a gradual, legal, and “gentle” erosion of institutions.

While the book draws on global patterns, it focuses heavily on the Israeli case, particularly the judicial overhaul efforts and the political climate surrounding October 7.

Roznai and Gidron identify what they see as a dangerous synergy between two forces: Populism and Polarization.

* Populism: Leaders frame themselves as the only true representatives of “the people” against “corrupt elites” (often the judiciary or media). This creates a justification for removing institutional constraints that “block the will of the people.”

* Affective Polarization: When society is deeply divided and citizens feel hostility toward their political rivals, they become willing to tolerate undemocratic behavior from their own leaders.

* The Loop: Populist leaders intentionally deepen polarization because a polarized base is less likely to punish its leaders for eroding democratic norms as long as “the other side” is being defeated.

There’s much more to the argument; Roznai fears that Israel’s situation is dire. To be sure, not everyone agrees, but as he a leading legal scholar in Israel, hearing how he sees our present situation is key to understanding what keeps many Israelis up at night when they think about the future of the country they call home.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Yaniv Roznai is a Professor and Vice-Dean at the Harry Radzyner Law School, and Co-director at the Rubinstein Center for Constitutional Challenges, Reichman University. He holds a PhD and LL.M (Distinction) from The London School of Economics (LSE), and LLB and BA degrees (Magna cum Laude) in Law and Government from the IDC.

In 2015-2016, Yaniv was a Post-Doc Fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions, University of Haifa and at the Hauser Global Law School, New York University (NYU). In 2013, he was a visiting researcher at the Program in Law and Public Affair (LAPA), Princeton University. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Milan in Italy, Mae Fah Luang University in Thailand, University of the Basque Country in Spain, Koç University in Turkey, Graz University in Austria, and Emory University in the United States.

He is a Co-Chair of the Israeli Section of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) and an elected member of the Council of ICON-S between 2019-2022. He is the Co-Founder of the Israeli Association of Legislation and was a Co-Chair between 2017-2020. He is an elected board member and former secretary general of the Israeli Association of Public Law. Prof. Roznai's scholarship focuses on comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, legisprudence, and public international law.

His book, “Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments - The Limits of Amendment Powers” was published in 2017 with Oxford University Press – Constitutional Theory Series. In 2018 it was awarded the Inaugural International Society for Public Law (ICONS) Book Prize (and shortlisted for the Hart-SLSA Theory and History Book Prize). His book "Constitutional Revolution", co-authored with Prof. Gary Jacobsohn, was published with Yale University Press in 2020.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

It is a very, very stormy and rainy day here in Israel, which is the reason that though Professor Yaniv Roznai and I were planning to actually have this conversation in his office at Raichman University in Hertzelia, my wife implored me not to brave the highways again like we did a couple of weeks ago when water was flashing everywhere and it was really actually pretty dangerous. So I hope the next time we do this, Yaniv, if we can do this in person. It would It would really be a pleasure. But in the meantime, I'm really very grateful to you for coming on today to talk about an issue that was once really the central headline about the state of Israel, more or less from January '23, really, I guess, till the end of September '23. Those were the nine months in which the issue of judicial reform was really tearing Israel apart. And we tried to bring on, as we always do in Israel, from the inside, people from a variety of views. We had on Moshe Koppel, who is the Kohelet forum, who I think some people would argue is the intellectual godfather, so to speak, of the judicial reform.A very smart person who believes very strongly that judicial reform is necessary. He was not at all happy with how it was rolled out, and he was not happy with all of the clauses of the proposal that were ultimately suggested. But he was definitely in favor of judicial reform, and he was by no means abashed about it. He's highly articulate, highly smart. On the opposite side of this, we brought you on back in those days to talk to us about why you were so deeply concerned about judicial reform, why you felt it was so dangerous to Israel's future as a democracy and as a referee of reports periodically, not with either of you, but in her own terms, we brought on from Hebrew University, Professor Neta Barak Koren, who I think did some wonderful work explaining to people, both in English papers and in Hebrew papers, what's wrong with the current system? What is the proposal to change it? Why is the proposal to change it too much and problematic? What would a more moderate proposed change be that she thought might even address some of the needs but not go too far? So we did what we always do in these issues, which was to try to bring in an array of viewpoints because what matters here is not what I think, but what matters is what Israelis Israelis who are leaders in their fields think.And we're back to judicial reform. We're not back to the judicial reform because it is the main subject in the headline. But if you read the Hebrew press, it did not go away and you hear murmurs of it all the time. The continued attacks on the attorney general are part of that, it seems to me. If those people who were very much following, by the way, the end of the war and looked at the instance in the Knesset and who was invited and who was not invited to that sitting of the Knesset and who the ministers of the government did not want present, it was very telling and quite inappropriate, if you ask me. So this is happening, and it's not over. The present government, and certainly its ministers, have every intention of pushing this forward. And the reason I wanted to have Professor Roznai come back and talk to us once again is because several months ago already, he and a colleague, Noam Gidron, published a book in Hebrew, which is a fabulous book. It's a short book. It's a brief read, but it's a very compelling and disturbing read to me.It's not out in English yet. And so therefore, the only way of getting our mostly English-speaking listeners and readers to understand what it is that he and his colleagues are talking about was to bring him on. We're going to put a much longer biographical summary of Professor Yaniv Roznai in the notes for today. But just to do it very, very briefly, Yaniv Roznai is a distinguished Israeli journalist and a leading global authority in comparative constitutional law. He is the full professor and vice dean at the Harry Radzyner Law School at the Reichman University and co-director of the Rubenstein Center for Constitutional Changes, also at Reichman. He holds a PhD and an LLM with distinction from LSE, of course, the London School of Economics, and an LLBMBA degrees, Magnus Cum Laude from the IDC itself. In 2015 to 2016, he was a postdoc fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions at Haifa University, and the Hauser Global Law School in New York University. He has taught and been involved with Princeton, the University of Milan, Mai Fa Luang University in Thailand, the University of Basque country in Spain, Kutx University in Turkey, Emory University, Graz University in Austria.I could go on and on. He is internationally, greatly in demand because his scholarship is so cutting edge and because he's such an excellent presenter and because he talks about issues that are so critical, really in our conversation to Israel today. But of course, these are issues that we see all over the world. When we look at modern democracies, American democracy is obviously very much under attack, many people would say. Orban's work is already done. Putin's work with whatever little bit of democracy there was in a fledgling democratic Russia is already done. This is not only an Israel problem, it's a worldwide issue, but we're focused today on Israel. And nobody better to talk about this than Professor Yaniv Roznai. So Yaniv, thank you very much for taking the time to come on. Why don't we begin by giving us a little a little bit of a sense of the argument of the book that you wrote on democracy in retreat with Noam Gidron, what the two of you argue, what's happening worldwide, but why is Israel vulnerable to your minds in a unique and special way.So thank you very much, Daniel, for inviting me and for this very general introduction. So Noam and I, basically, what we try to do is to make our academic work accessible to the greater public and to try to explain in a relatively concise and brief manner the risks that we see to Israeli democracy. And what we are trying to do is to link three elements and bring them together. And these three elements are, one, populism and populist governments. Basically, the idea by populism, we mean that governments pretend to represent the real people against those corrupted or detached elites. The deep state, as if the people speak in one voice, and this one voice comes out of the the road of the leader or the leading government. And part of it is the populist project. So if I represent the people, and the people are the sovereign, so basically, I'm sovereign and I have sovereign powers, and I can do whatever I want. And therefore, any limitations on my power, opposition, constitution, courts, the media, etc, all these mechanisms that limit my power are simply undemocratized democratic because they undermine the very notion of populist sovereignty.So populism takes a very democratic idea of populist sovereignty and takes it to the extreme. And you can add to that also the notion of majoritarianism. The rule of the majority is the basic condition for democracy, but populism takes it into extreme. I want the elections, I have the majority. Therefore, I speak on behalf of the real people, and therefore, any limitation on majority power are illegitimate, and I can get rid of them, weaken them, etc. So we take this notion of populism, and we connect it to polarization, and especially effectiveness or emotional polarization. So not so much ideological polarization, but basically, if I have to put it briefly, how much I hate the other side and love my own leader. And we try to show how this plays within the Israeli society. And we link populism to polarization, because on the one hand, populism comes more or less top-down from the leaders, and polarization is within the society, so it's bottom up. And we try to show how populist leaders actually have an incentive to widen and deepen polarization in order to achieve various undemocratic reforms. And we'll probably come back to that later and we'll see how it played during 2023.But there's a third element to polarization and populism, and that is the institutional arrangements. If you look at some other countries, populism is not unique to Israel, although we can talk about some of the unique features of populism in Israel. But for the populist project, in other words, the undermine of various democratic institutions, sometimes it's not very easy because you have a rigid constitution, or you have a very elaborate and rigid Bill of Rights and strong judicial review, and various political mechanisms that make it very hard for the government to push forward with various reforms. Think, for example, of a presidential veto in presidential systems, or think of a federal system in which you have a vertical separation of powers between the central government and the states. Just remember the tough life that the governors gave to Trump during COVID. You can do whatever you want if you have states or provinces or lander from below that pushback. So the institutional arrangement, Noam and I think, is a crucial element that we need to remember in this triangle of populism and the populist projects, on the one hand, polarization, on the other hand. And here, Israel, we think, is extremely vulnerable to the populist project.And the reason is that unlike many other countries, Israel has a very, very weak system of checks and balances. In all other democracies in the world, really, without an exception, there are various mechanisms that make sure that political power is not centralized with one organ. So we've just mentioned federal systems and presidential systems. But think of parliamentary systems where you have two chambers within the parliament, two houses, lower house and upper house. Then you have some a political check within the political process that can slow down or even block various proposals. Think of constituencies or some a regional element in the elections. If I'm the representative of Bristol in the British Parliament, I care about my party, I care about my government, but I also care about my own voters in Bristol because I want to get elected again in Bristol. So this puts within the political process another interest, in a way, a local interest that is important in the process. And think, of course, on various supranational mechanisms. Think of the EU, for example. So the European Union, you have the European Parliament, and you have the European Court of Justice. And all those 46 states that are members to the Council of Europe are subordinated to the European Court of Human Rights and to the European Convention on Human Rights.So there are all these mechanisms that make sure that political power is decentralized. Israel is the only country in the world, the only democratic country in the world without any such mechanisms.

it is lacking any of the above mentioned mechanisms for checking governmental power. We are not a federal state. We're a unitary state. We don't have any presidential veto. We're a parliamentary system. Unlike many other parliamentary system, we only have one chamber in the Knesset in the parliament. We are not subordinated to any supernatural institution. So basically, in our system, the political power is almost without any checks within the political process. I'm putting aside the court, which we'll come back to in a second. And in the Israeli case, it gets even more complicated because it is not only that in our parliamentary system, the government controls the Knesset, but basically, those who control the Knesset and the legislators are maybe five or six politicians, those who had the coalition parties. I think of Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben Gvir and Goldknopf. We're talking about six politicians, more or less. And whatever they want, is what will happen because they can impose their will through coalition discipline. So we have six politicians controlling the legislator without any rigid constitution or any limitations, which gives the government enormous powers in Israel. So if you have a populist government, basically, there are hardly any checks on what they can do in the political process. And here I come to the judiciary. There are basically two organs that can limit this governmental power. And one is the attorney general who is part of the executive. But basically this is a professional and independent jurist that is mainly the main gatekeeper within the political process, the government adopts hundreds of decisions every day in governmental departments and the legal advisors to the government on the main gatekeepers to make sure that there are no rights violation, rule of law, corruption, etc. So that's one organ. And the second organ is the judiciary. We have a very strong and independent Supreme Court, or at least we used to have one, that is very strong. And we needed that strong court because of the strength of the government.

So I have to be clear because I think that my own opinion is not very much clear in the public agenda in the sense that I'm not a big fan of courts and of the court. I mean, I'm happy to reduce the powers of the judiciary if in turn, we manage to put various checks and balances within the political process. So I want to strengthen the Knesset. I want to strengthen the people in the process and weaken the government. So if it was up to me, I don't want even the court to never intervene in any decision. But in order to do that, you need very good mechanisms that would make sure that there are no rights violations within the political process. And this is not the case. So just to sum up this argument, Israel has very weak limitations on political power. And therefore, when you have a populist government, democracy is at greater risk compared to to other countries. So this is basically, in a nutshell, the argument that Noam and I are trying to put in.I have a lot of different questions that I want to ask you about this because they go off in different kinds of ways. I want to talk about possible fixes when you say that you want to strengthen the government because you're not a huge fan of the courts running everything. I'd like to hear what that would entail a little bit. Does that involve regional representation to a certain extent and so on and so forth? I want to hear your take on the whole issue surrounding the Attorney General in this particular instance right now, which has become a huge brouhaha. And I want to get a sense of your sense of what the government that we actually have right now and that we're going to have probably until October, I would guess. And then it may very well get reelected, I think, is not out of the question in some way, shape, manner, or form. What you think the plan is. In other words, assuming that we're fortunate and the war stays mostly silent, then there's a little bit of a kerfuffle here or there, but the days of war for an hour behind us. What do you imagine the government's plan to be? And how do you see 2023 re-erupting?So let's talk about a little bit first of all, what you think the fixes are. What would it take to strengthen the government as you see it? Second of all, say something about what's going on with the Attorney General, because I think a lot of our listeners and readers don't know a lot about who she is and why the attacks on her are so vociferous. And then let's talk a little bit about what you think is waiting for us as Israelis as the political process continues.The first thing that we have to fix is to stabilize our constitutional system. I don't think that many of the listeners abroad realize how fragile our system is. In the US, it's almost impossible to amend the Constitution because the Americans have the most rigid Constitution in the world. We're talking about 27 amendments since the adoption of the Constitution. In Israel, only in the last decade, we had more constitutional changes than the entire US history. We're basically talking about an average in the last eight or nine years We're talking about average of almost five constitutional amendments a year, and it's very easy. So if tomorrow the Knesset wants to abolish basic law, the judiciary or basic law, human dignity or to amend it, it can do so in a single day with a simple majority of three versus two or two versus one. And so no special majority, no temporal restrictions within the process. Extremely easy to enact and to amend basic laws. So the first thing that we need to make sure is to stabilize that system, because what it means is now every government in power or every majority in power can, in a way, make dramatic shifts in our constitutional order. And this is not healthy. What is going to have to do? You have to change the laws by which basic laws can be amended. You need a three-quarter majority to change basic laws. How does it work in your mind?So exactly. So I was thinking of something like two-thirds majority. I think of like 80 Knesset members, and some a temporal restriction that you would have to wait a certain period, let's say three or four months between the readings, to make sure that this is not just a momentary caprice, but something that is well thought of and deliberated, etc. And if we had this procedure, already the system would have been in a better place. And this is something that I think that is crucial. The second element is a Bill of Rights. Unlike any other democracy, Israel is behind in protecting fundamental rights. And I'm not talking here, Daniel, about some progressive rights, such the right to Wi-Fi. No, I'm talking about elements, rights that were recognized over 200 years ago in the American and French Revolution. Equality, free speech, freedom of religion, the very basic rights that we regard them as natural rights that should not be taken away easily. And these rights are not protected explicitly in our basic laws. It is true that these rights get some protection by the court, thanks to its interpretation of human dignity. But it's not enough, and it's not legitimate.And we want the legislator to be able to put in writing that all men are equal. They don't want to do it. So I think we need to complete our Bill of Rights. And again, if you look at an average constitution, a modern constitution, you would an average of 35 rights protected. I don't want to go there. I'll settle for just equality and free speech and freedom of religion, the right to education, a limited It's a limited set of rights that need to be included in our basic laws. That's the second element. The third element, I talked about some institutional issues. Look at our Knesset. The Knesset has 120 Knesset members. This was a very good number for January 1949, when the Knesset was established, when we had about, I don't know, 500, 600,000 people in Israel. Now we have 10 million citizens. We need to expand the Knesset because this is our representatives. I should be able to approach them, to meet with them, to send them emails and letters. So we need to expand the Knesset. Also in New Zealand, you have 120 parliament members, but for 5 million citizens, not 10 million.So we need to make the Knesset bigger and stronger with more professional staff, really to enable them to do the professional work that they need to do, which is basically a legislation and supervision of the government. And vice versa, we need to to make the government smaller. Look at the current government. In its peak, we had about 40 ministers and deputy ministers, 40. This is insane. There is no justification.And each one costs a fortune.So first, of course, there's the economic, but the inefficiency. And there is no justification in Israel for more than 12 ministries, really. And add to that the fact that we also have a very high number of committees within the parliament, within the Knesset. Each Knesset member has to be simultaneously in three or four committees. They cannot do their work properly. Look at the situation now. We have 120 Knesset members. Deduct from them between 35 to 40 ministers or deputy ministers, more or less. The speaker of the House, the chairs of the committees, you are left with grosso modo 70, 74 Knesset members who are supposed to do all the work. It's insane. So this is one institutional element that must be fixed, this relationship between the Knesset and the government.The third element that I think is crucial, or the fourth element, if we include the Bill of Rights, is the electoral system. The electoral system. Israel is the only democracy among Western democracies that its electoral system is lacking any either regional or personal element. So when I go to vote in the elections, I put in the ballot, one ballot that says only my party. This could be Likoud or Yesh Atid or whatever. But that's it. And in many other countries, you either have what we call a semi-open the ballot so I can actually list those candidates that I think that are good. Or if you don't have that, you have some a regional element, as we've mentioned earlier. And this is important because it improves the connection between the voters-It creates some accountability, basically.Exactly. And that's the second element, the accountability. We always ask ourselves, how the hell is it It's not possible that the current government is not establishing a commission of inquiry? How come? How come? How come that in the Israeli country, we have a majority of the people who want transportation in Shabbat and who want civil marriage? How come this doesn't translate to some a political policy? It's not about the people that they are mean or bad. It's a matter of interest. And nowadays in our electoral system, all the interests and the incentives are not to do what the larger public wants or the greater public interests, but what your electoral base want or the leader of your party. Because I need to remind you that most of the political, at least now in Israel, the political lists now in Israel, the political parties, are actually dictatorial. So there is no open primaries, no elections, no open democratic process. I don't know if people are aware, half of the Knesset members now were elected by a single person or elected by a single person. It's insane.Meaning, just to explain what you mean, you meaning that there was no primaries in their party. So it was the head of the party that made up the list of the 120 people in her party or his party, and somebody picked them. It could be their aunt, their uncle, their neighbor, the guy that they used to be in business with. But the only person who determined they're getting on the list and therefore, they're getting into the Knesset was the person at the head of the list. That's what you're saying, right?Spot on. So all these issues are issues that must be fixed. And again, not to bring us into, I don't know, an ultra modern idea of democracy, but simply to put us in line with existing Western democracies among OECD, et cetera, because we are so much behind when it comes to liberal democracies.Give me a sense a little bit about how this might work. You said that 120 people was fined for 1949, when we had our first elections in January 1949. Now we are, let's say, 10, 11, 12 times the size of that. We've gotten to 10 million people. You're obviously not proposing that the Knesset be 1,200 people. You're not talking about 10 times the population, so 10 times the size. That's ridiculous. I mean, obviously, the House of Representatives is 435. The Senate in the United States is 100.Altogether, it's 535. There are 360 million. So I understand that you're not suggesting that. So I'm interested in hearing from you about two things, and one of them in particular, I think even more than the size, is this whole issue of regional representation, which people are always asking me about. How would it work? So give us a sense, what do you think is the optimal size of the Knesset? Are you talking about having a second house of the Knesset? Are you giving up that that ship has already sailed? And how would we take the system that we have and amend it somewhat so that you would vote for a party But there would still be some regional representation. I live in Beer Sheva. I'm going to just give people an example, by the way. Part of the reason that Ben Gvir won is because he put on the sides of busses in Beer Sheva, 'mi po Bal ha'bait?' who owns the house here? Because people in Beer Sheva were scared of going out at night because of Bedouin violence and crime. And that's what they cared about. They wanted their 16-year-old daughter to be able to go to the mall on a Saturday night and not to be scared. And if Ben Gvir said he was going to take care of that, then they'll vote for Ben Gvir. And then we've lived with what we've ever had to live with. So what do you see as an optimal size for the Israeli parliament, given the fact that we're now about a 10 million person country? And how does one keep the system that we have basically while also injecting into it a certain amount of local representation.So I don't have in mind any revolutionary idea. I want a small scale change, a relatively small scale. Imagine, for example, that instead 120, we would have an extra 60 Knesset members, okay? Bring it to 180. And these 60 members will represent 60 districts, for example. Each district selects one person. And At the very least, even if it's not a different house, at the very least, you would have a large segment within the Knesset that would represent some a regional interest. I think this this is something that is doable. I actually think that the idea of regional or inserting into the process some regional element is something that is quite accepted within the various research centers, et cetera. The problem, of course, is that there is what we call the agency difficulty. No one within the process has any incentive of changing it. So especially not the smaller parties, because the current situation in Israel, that Israel is overly representative, which means that you have many parties, and the smaller parties have relatively greater powers than their power in society or think, for example, think of the current government. The Likud, obviously, is the governing party. But the Likud is much weaker in a relative sense than Ben Gvir and Smotrich, because they are the king makers. And that is a big problem because then it pushes the government to the more extreme ends, and we need to change it. And if you insert a more regional element, those who would be weakened by that procedure are the weaker parties. Okay, the ultra-orthodox or the Arab.So we would have some element, some mechanism by which you'd have some regional representation. The Knesset would be a little bit bigger so that there'd be more people to actually do the work. We would try to professionalize it and so on and so forth. Can you talk to us a little bit about the Attorney General, who, to my mind, seems like an extremely capable and admirable person, but I could be wrong about her politics, and you can tell me if I'm missing something. But it was under relentless attack from Ben Gvir, from Smotrich, from Levin, from Goldknopf. I mean, Goldknopf less now, obviously. But what's your assessment of the job that she's been doing, even just recently now, talking about that maybe Bibi should have to fire Ben Gvir because he's creating what she calls irreparable damage to the Israeli system? I mean, she's been out there very much as a force in a way that it's hard to remember a previous attorneys general doing. On the other hand, she's dealing with a situation that previous attorneys general haven't had to deal with. So give us, Professor Yaniv Roznai, his assessment of how she's doing, what she's up to, and whether the critiques are in place and so forth.So first, maybe it's important to understand the unique position of the Attorney General within the Israeli system. So as I've mentioned earlier, the attorney general is basically an independent juries selected by an independent committee. This is a change that took place about 25 years ago. In the past, it was only the government appointing the attorney general. But now this process is that the government is appointing someone after recommendation of an independent committee, in a way, to make sure that this person is really independent, and you cannot get rid of her or him very easily. So you need certain justifications. One of them is, for example, that you cannot work with her or him. Now, the attorney general has a very important role in our system because she is, according to the judgments of the Supreme Court, she is the official interpreter of the law before the government. So if I'm a minister or if I'm now in the cabinet meeting, whatever the attorney general tells me, this is the law to the government. Of course, the court can say otherwise, but she's the official interpreter of the law when it comes to the government. So not only she's extremely powerful, because not only she is the official interpreter, but she also has the prosecution.Imagine that you're a minister and I'm your legal adviser, and I tell you, Daniel, what you're doing now is illegal or disproportionate or unreasonable. And if you don't listen to me, then you are perhaps facing a criminal charge here. You would think twice whether to do that or not. So she plays these two roles, and there are additional two roles. One of them is that she represents the government in litigation. So she needs to defend certain acts, etc. And if there are certain actions that are illegal on their face, she can say, for example, I will not defend that approach. And if you want to defend it, bring your own private lawyer to represent that approach. And the final hat that she wears is the hat of the, let's say, public interest. So the attorney general has a unique position in various cases, for example, child adoption and elections and many other legal affairs. So it's a very, very powerful actor. And the current attorney general, Gali Baharav Miara, was appointed in the previous government. I need to remind us. But because it's an independent position, she is not replaced whenever a new government is formed. So she continues her term until she ends her term. She has a term limit. And many of the arguments or claims or criticism against her now is that she's actually blocking the government from acting. This is the accusation. She doesn't allow us to govern. She blocks everything we do. Now, I think here we need to put things in proportion. It is true that unlike previous governments or previous attorney generals, she has raised, let's say, a red flag many more times than others before. That is true. But you also need to consider that the current government has been pushing forward with many, many prima facie illegal and unconstitutional maneuvers, and never any government before has tried, and therefore, she has to block many more things. Now, I think we can really argue on, let's say, three or four issues, whether it was she was correct or not, that this would be the battle. But when I see, I don't think that any of her legal opinions was far fetched or totally unreasonable. So to my mind, at least, every legal advice she gave was within a certain, let's say, sphere of reasonables, or it was a very reasonable legal advice.And again, we're talking about a small number of cases where you can argue that she's gone too far, maybe three or four cases. And when you look at the larger picture, our government is is almost finishing four years. In these three and something years, the government has adopted thousands of decisions, resolutions, appointments. She has blocked What? 15 issues, 20 issues? So this is basically, so there's not even a real justification for the accusations. And nonetheless, what she's blocking are things that are important for the government, illegal things that the government wants to push forward. And that is why the government is trying to get rid of her. So at first, they try to go to go through the golden route and get rid of her according to the procedure. They failed to do so. So they changed the procedure in an illegal manner, and this was blocked by the court, unanimously, a unanimous decision by our Supreme Court, including very conservative judges. So this was blocked by the court, and she is still in her position. But as you've mentioned correctly, there are endless attempts to delegitimize her, to undermine her, mainly they're trying to make her leave the position.

So just to give you one example, the Minister of Justice changed the lock in his office in Tel Aviv, because once a week, the attorney general was walking from that office in Tel Aviv. So he changed the locks on the door so that she cannot answer.It's high school. It's really high school.Exactly. But this is what she's facing. So they are refusing to call her the Attorney General. They call her that lawyer. And when she comes to the cabinet, they put her in the corner to sit in the corner and not in the center. These issues. But she is so strong that I don't think that she really gives a lot about it. She knows her job, she's doing her job, and this is what frustrates them. So they tried to get rid of her. They couldn't do it. Now they're trying in a very in a blitz within the Constitutional Law Committee, they're trying to split the role of the Attorney General to two different roles so that the government will be able to appoint its own legal adviser as a personal appointment. They hope, the government is hoping, that this would make her resign from office.And we need to remember that all this is happening against the backdrop of Netanyahu's criminal trial, because as I've mentioned, the Attorney General also heads the prosecution. So Netanyahu's dream is to replace Gali Baharav Miara with someone of his liking that he can choose someone convenient that would basically end the trial in a convenient settlement, and this would be the end of it, because the trial is not going very well for Netanyahu. This is his dream, basically.Let me ask you something, and I'm beginning to wrap up here because I want to come back to the thesis of your book, which is about the democracy in retreat. I want to get a sense of how worried you are about the retreat at this point. I'll put a couple of questions out there, and you can pick and choose how you want to answer them. So one question is, would it be better for the country just to give him the pardon? Again, that's a whole issue. How one pardons, can one pardon, can a person be pardoned before they're convicted? I mean, a thousand different issues. But would it be better from the point of view of the country for Herzog just to give him the pardon, as unpopular as it might be? If Bibi wasn't worried about his case, would he then no longer be so dead set on the changes to democracy that have you and your colleagues so worried. And to go back to other examples, I think we said this before, maybe not. If you look at me, I understand Putin. What's Putin up to? I mean, there wasn't much of a democracy to pull apart.But Putin really kind of wants to restore the great Russia of all. That's why he needs the Ukraine because it's part of a classic Russia. It's also a warm water port. But in all, what Putin wants is the glory days of Russia. Trump says he wants to make America great again. It's some of that. It's obviously enriching himself and his family and his cronies to a certain extent. And in his mind, I'm sure he believes that he's taking care of certain excesses that had taken place in previous administrations, and particularly democratic administrations. And many of his voters actually seem to agree with that part of what he's doing. Bibi, I could be very naive here, but I don't have a sense to what Bibi wants to do is to leave office with a quarter of a billion dollars in Swiss bank accounts. It just doesn't seem to me, he likes to be treated well. He He likes to fly nicely. He likes to have nice suits. I don't think that this is really fundamentally about him privatizing some major industry and taking the money for himself. That doesn't seem to me to be the issue. He also seems to me to be a person who's among all the people that we just mentioned, Putin, Trump, and Bibi, by far the best read, by far the most historically knowledgeable and insightful.And by far, I think a person whose reputation in the history of the State of Israel matters a tremendous amount to him. And so I'm asking myself, what's really motivating him here? If he was not dealing with this judicial issue in his own case, how much when he gets to bed at night, is he really worried about the excesses of the court? How much when he gets into bed at night, is he really worried about what the Barak Court did for so many years that he thinks was an excess? And to what extent, if we just let him off the hook and said, Okay, you know what? You do this, we'll do that, we'll let you off the hook, how much of this would go away? And therefore, my second question if it doesn't happen that way, and if Herzog does not give him a pardon or because maybe he would have to admit something and he won't admit it in order to get the pardon or whatever, in how much danger is this country? How worried are you that, let's say, The court cases don't go away. Some version of this coalition is reelected in October. We have, let's say, four or five more years of it, whatever, four more years of it. How worried are you about what Israeli democracy really is going to look like, let's say, six years from now?These are all terrific questions. Let me start with what Netanyahu really wants, which is hard to say. I'm not a psychologist, but let me tell you that. Netanyahu admired Aharon Barak, and he admired the idea of a strong and independent court. In 2012, he came to the Supreme Court and spoke with Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch for her retirement. And he explained how an independent court is the most crucial pillar of a democracy. And without a strong independent court, there is no democracy, etc. And throughout the last 20, 30 years, there were always attempts or proposals to limit the judiciary, et cetera. Netanyahu always blocked them, always blocked them. It is only now in this current government that Netanyahu basically gave Yariv Levin and his partners a blank check to do whatever they want, because first, I think it was now convenient for him that he's now under trial. But The problem is, I think that we are way beyond that, and the judicial overhaul is, I think now, much bigger issue than Netanyahu and his criminal trial. So I think even if you pardon now Netanyahu, which I think would be a mistake, nothing would change.Daniel, if you would go to a bully in school and he asked you for a $20, and you give him the $20 in the next day, will it end? No, he would just ask for $40. And I think that now the current government is acting like a bully, unfortunately. We have a set of politicians who want to govern without limitations. And basically, they're not only trying to undermine any limitations on their power. So we're talking, look at the blitz that is now going on in the Knesset. They only change the Judicial Selection Committee. They change the law about the Ombudsman of the Judges. They want to lower the salaries of the judges. They tried to get rid of the Attorney General, and now they're trying to undermine the entire institution of the lawyers and the attorney general. At this very moment, as we speak, there are bills in parliament to undermine civil society and various human rights organizations. There are various proposals to undermine free and independent media. There are various proposals that would change the way electoral laws. So the government is doing all these things. So they're trying to govern without any limitations. But moreover, what do they want? They want political entrenchment. They They want to stay in power. That's the idea. So I think that Netanyahu and his partners want to stay in power. But for Netanyahu, I don't think, I'm not sure. As you mentioned, it's so much about the money. I think it's about the legacy. I think that Netanyahu truly believes that he's the only leader who can save Israel and anyone else would bring Israel to destruction. I think he truly believes it. He has this grander illusion, and I think this is what motivates him and his family. But Netanyahu is not alone here. He has his partners. So the ultra-Orthodox, they want to get exemption for military service, and they want to have a discriminatory allocation of budget. So they want to get more money. And the only organ that blocks them is the Attorney General in the court. And we have Smotrich and his partners that they want to push forward with the annexation and extension of the occupation. And the only organ that blocks them is the court and the Attorney General.So we have here an amalgamation of interests. Netanyahu, together with Smotrich, together with the ultra-Orthodox. And we need to add to that the fourth element, and this is what I call the ideologies, Yariv Levin and Simcha Rotman. And these people really believe that democracy is only the will of the majority. That's it. So I think this all comes together. And this, I think, Daniel, is a good place just to put again what I've mentioned earlier about polarization in Israel. Because when you asked In 2023, Likud voters, why do you support or do you support the reform in the judicial system? We had about a third saying that they do not support and two-thirds who said they support. And when you ask these two-thirds, why do you support the reform? Is it because our court is too activist? Is it because the Supreme Court judges are, I don't know, detached elites? They tie the hands of the IDF. Why? Why do you support this reform? The best predictor of supporting the judicial reform was how much I hate the other side and love Netanyahu. The best predictor. So it's about this polarization. And And this is very worrying. Why? Because if you know that your political base will support whatever you do, whether it's in the judicial sphere, whether it's in other spheres. For example, you have Turkey now sitting in Gaza and not establishing a commission of inquiry. You know that your political base will still support you simply because they hate the other side. This gives you an incentive to expand and deepen polarization. And this is why we have now all this campaign against the court, against the President of the Court, the elected President, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who they say that they don't recognize him, and they refuse to call him the President of the Court, and the Attorney General as enemy of the state. This is the political campaign, us versus them. They are the enemies, and they need this campaign. They need this campaign in order to first, to deepen polarization, and second, to shift away any sense of responsibility to October 7 and what happened from this elected government to other people.My last question, because I know you have a tremendous amount going on today, and I want to make sure that you get the class on time and all of that. My question about the future is really, at the end of the day, all that matters. This is all about what's the future going to look like. And so my question is, let's assume for whatever reason that we get some similar government elected in October, a little tweak here, a little tweak there, some change in the parties, but ostensibly the Haredim is still part of it. Smotrich and Ben Gvir are still part of it, Levin is part of it, the Likud has some control. Something like what we have now, a little change, maybe. What do you think Israel looks like at the end of that administration, that condens, let's say five, six years from now, what are you worried Israel is going to look like, and what do you think Israel is going to look like?So I think that the coming elections are the most important elections in the history of the state for the future of Israel as a liberal democracy. If, God forbid, we would have the same, more or less, government, this means that in five years or a few years or 10 years, okay, Israel will no longer be the same Israel that you and I know. It would be more similar to Turkey and Lebanon. Maybe it would take 15 years more or 20 years. But this is the direction. We already had 90,000 people leaving Israel this year, many of them academics, doctors, engineers, high tech people. And many of the people around me. In these industries, they say that the next election is the test. If we get the same government, you would have about, let's say, additional 150 to 200 people, 1,000 people leaving Israel. And this is the people that are most crucial to our economy, to our science. And this would be a disaster for the future of Israel. And I very much fear for our futures. And this is why I think that the liberal camp must unite. They must understand what's at stake here. And it's not the end of the story because we've seen in 2023, there is a large liberal population who care about the future of Israel as a liberal democracy. So I don't think it's the end of the story. I think that we can still calculate a different route. If we would have a normal and sane coalition in the coming elections, I think we can still stabilize the system and maybe even change direction to a better future. But if this doesn't happen for some reason, and one of the things that I fear is that Netanyahu will try to undermine competitive elections here, then this would be a disaster for our future, unfortunately.Well, what would be important for our future is for your book to be translated into English, I have to say. Demokratia Be'Nesiga is really, it's a short book, and it's not one of these very hard to understand academic tomes. It's very accessible to the popular reader, but it's critically important because it's not yet out in English. I thought it was important to hear, at least from one of the two authors, about how they understand the structural threats to the fundamental changes in Israeli democracy. I can't imagine a better introduction to the ideas of the book and to a clear statement of what's at stake, which is basically everything. So Professor Yaniv Roznai, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us. I appreciate having you back on after we talked about this in 2023 during the judicial reform. And hopefully the next time we get you on, we'll even talk about how all of these things that you're so worried about actually never came to be that Israel has restored itself to being one of the world's great liberal democracies. And although you have a full, rich career ahead of you, it can perhaps be a little bit less encumbered by worry. I'm not quite sure we're going to have that conversation so quickly, but we'll have one conversation or another, and I very much look forward to it. And thank you very, very much once again.Thank you,. I hope so, too.

In the pages of Sapir, to my mind one of the finest Jewish journals now being published, Jordan Hirsch opens his recent essay on The Need for a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund as follows:

The golden age of American Jewry is indeed ending — and the Jewish community can’t see past its fading reflection. The institutions upon which American Jewish flourishing once relied are crumbling. It’s time for American Jewry to build new foundations for its next phase of achievement, and to build them stronger than before.

It’s a bold claim, with far-reaching implications.

One of the most common responses that I’ve heard to Hirsch’s piece (an essay that much of the establishment seems not to wish to discuss publicly) is that without the very institutions that Hirsch argues have outlived their utility, Israel might be in danger of losing the MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) that now assures Israel’s receiving some $3.8B in American military aid each year. “That aid is key to Israel’s very survival,” these people argue, “and you’re going to pull the plug on the institutions that pride themselves on their role in making sure the MOU gets renewed?”

Seems like a very fair question.

Interestingly, though, just days after we recorded our conversation below with Jordan Hirsch and Eyal Hulata, a leading security expert in Israel, the following announcement appeared all over the press:

Why would Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggest, however obliquely, that the MOU is not necessary? Is it because the MOU undermines Israel’s becoming more militarily autonomous? Or perhaps, is it because, as many in the Israeli press argued, he knows that it’s not going to be renewed anyway, so he might as well say that we don’t need it?

Hirsch’s piece has far-reaching implications for what American Jewish institutional life should look like, the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora, and Israel’s security (among a host of other issues). Many of those important implications are beyond the scope of the conversation at the heart of Israel from the Inside, but the issues of Israel-Diaspora relations, Israel’s security and related subjects are squarely within our purview.

In today’s conversation, Hirsch and Hulata discuss the Sapir article, and what Israel does and does not need from America to remain secure and independent.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Jordan Hirsch is a Senior Fellow at Palantir, an American company that specializes in software platforms for big data analytics, and a Senior Fellow in the Technology, Security, and Global Affairs Program at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law.

Jordan was also a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University and a Next Generation National Security Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Jordan began his career in journalism, serving as a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal and an editor at Foreign Affairs. Jordan graduated from Columbia University and Yale Law School.

Dr Eyal Hulata is a senior international fellow at the FDD (Foundation for the Defense of Democracies), and the first foreign visiting fellow in FDD headquarters. From July 2021 to January 2023 Eyal served as Israel’s National Security Advisor and head of Israel’s National Security Council (NSC). Eyal was appointed by Prime Minister Naftali Bennet and served after their succession also for Prime Minister Yair Lapid. During his tenure, Eyal coordinated the national effort on Iran, coordinated the maritime border agreement with Lebanon, and co-headed the Strategic Consultation Group with his American counterpart, Mr. Jake Sullivan. Prior to that Eyal served for more than 20 years in the Israeli intelligence establishment, of which a decade was in senior executive roles.

Eyal is a graduate of the IDF elite technology leadership program “Talpiot” with a B.Sc in Physics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He also holds a PhD in physics from Tel Aviv University, and an MA in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

Truth is, there is no mood. Gaza might erupt as Trump pushes to Phase II, but then again, he might not, and Gaza might not.

The IDF is insisting that Hezbollah never really disarmed, and that if the Lebanese Army won’t do it, we will. But we might not.

The revolution in Iran is heating up, Trump is saber rattling (and after Venezuela, that might not be meaningless), but Iran has said that it will respond to any US military action with a strike against us. Still, I haven’t heard anyone here express a lot of worry. The army is apparently all over it, and no one I know has taken their generator out of storage, nor have I heard of anyone cancelling a trip.

Iran, I guess, might attack us. But they also might not.

There will eventually be elections here later this year, but even that, for now, isn’t a burning issue. There’s this story and that, this little scandal and that bigger one, but in a strange way, this is all normal, and many people are enjoying normal—and will enjoy it even more once we get Ran Gvili’s body returned, so he can be buried as he deserves to be.

Still, as you move from café to café, coffee to coffee, Shabbat meal to Shabbat meal, there is one subject that keeps coming up—the Haredi draft.

I posted the following video on Friday (it’s made its way around social media, and we added the subtitles), but in case you didn’t see it, take a quick look.

People mention either this video or similar ones, or even just the attitudes behind them, and their blood boils.

But then comes the big question: so what’s the solution? Because if there isn’t a solution, we’re not going to make it.

One (religious) person said to me over coffee earlier today, “I have no idea what the solution is, but here my faith steps in. I can’t believe that the Jewish people survived for thousands of years only to have this backward, repulsive way of being Jewish be the victor.”

His faith is stronger than mine. I can easily believe it.

The problem is that with Hamas, we know how to deal. We can’t completely destroy them, but we seem to know how to manage any attempts of theirs to regroup.

And Iran? Even if Iran decides to attack, we apparently know how to manage that.

Think of the way the Bible would tell this story. Iran attacked us, we did a tiny bit in return. They attacked us again, and we took out their defensive positions. And then it was quiet, until it wasn’t—and for 12 days, we bombed them relentlessly. Their citizens, too, saw that the regime is in many ways a paper tiger. A dangerous paper tiger, but a paper tiger nonetheless.

So now, no longer as deterred by the regime as they used to be, the people are rising up. If the regime should fall (which is obviously far from certain), will it be in large measure because it attacked the Jewish state?

Ironically, it will. Attacking the Jews wasn’t a good idea. (Think Purim, speaking of Iran.)

And if you don’t believe Iran, ask Hamas.

But what about enemies of the Jewish state who live in the Jewish state? What about enemies of the Jewish state who are Jews? What about the Jews who live in the Jewish state who are more dangerous to our future than are either Iran or Hamas?

When it comes to them, we have no idea what to do.

This government, of course, has a perfect solution. “Let us win again, and we’ll let them do what they please.”

There were days when Israel had Zionist governments.

Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

With Haredi protests continuing to be violent (directly causing the death of one Haredi teenager last week), and with no one having any good solution in mind for how to handle this existential threat to the Jewish state’s survival, we’re sharing today a few clips that are making their way across Israeli social media to give our readers and listeners a sense of what’s being said here and what people are talking about that can’t be picked up from the standard press.

The video at the very top of this post (we’ve added the subtitles to all these videos) was posted on Facebook by Naftali Bennett). It speaks for itself —a young woman who has already lost a partner, and now fears losing another, asking why the entire country can’t “be under the stretcher.”

“Being under the stretcher” is a common Israel phrase that, referring to not leaving anyone behind in the field, means that everyone takes a turn carrying whatever has to be carried. Indeed, note the photo atop Naftali Bennett’s Facebook Reels page, and that’s what you’ll see—people “under the stretcher,” shouldering their share of the burden.

The next video, below, was posted by Michal Barkai Brody, a leading advocate for women’s rights in Israel, and one of Israel’s most-in-demand public speakers. The video appears on her Facebook Reels page.

If you don’t look carefully, the video might not sound like much. But as you listen to Alon Kaminer speak about his determination to get back into the reserves, you need to notice his hands.

Look at the hands, listen to his determination—and then ask yourself if there ought to be a place in the Jewish state for the Haredi speaker in the video above who speaks about “what the army’s really worth.”

Then listen to Eli Meiri, below (also on his Reels page), a man who’s been a commander for thirty years. Listen to him speaking before the Knesset Committee, telling them what he’s focusing on now in the army— making sure the soldiers don’t kill themselves.

Listen to all of that, and then watch this video just posted by Or Sitt, a fabulous, much respected videographer in Israel, of a Haredi celebration of some draft dodgers who just got out of jail. No need for subtitles here … a quick gander even without the subtitles makes everything clear.

What should this country do?

If you have no idea, you’re in good company. And if you don’t want to think about it, you’re in the good company of our leaders.

One thing, though, is entirely clear.

Anyone who thinks that the dangers to our survival are Arabs doesn’t come close to beginning to get it.

Ben Gvir, YNet noted, was not committed to hanging as the only option for executing terrorists—there’s also the electric chair or anesthesia, he was quick to point out.

Thus far, the movement to impose the death penalty in Hamas terrorists (among others, obviously) hasn’t gotten a tremendous amount of traction. It’s not that the public is opposed—it’s that there are more immediate issues like the Haredi draft issue, this year’s upcoming elections, the possibility of renewed war with Iran, the fact that matters with Hamas and Gaza are stuck and—depending on how one reads the recent meeting in Mar-A-Lago—the worry that it may be only a matter of time until Trump erupts after losing his patience with Netanyahu.

Yet whether it is of immediate legislative import or not, the issue of the death penalty for terrorists is an important one—morally, halakhically, diplomatically, legally and otherwise. Mass murder, rape and more are undoubtedly heinous crimes, and the guilt of most of the terrorists is beyond question.

And the Bible is clear—for crimes such as these, one deserves to die.

But subsequent Jewish tradition has a much more complex attitude to this fraught issue. The Talmud notes that when the number of murderers increased, the Sanhedrin ceased hearing capital cases. Was that because it did not want to execute so many people? We might assume that, but the Talmud (Avodah Zarah 8b) suggests that their reasoning was more complex.

The sages knew that the Gentile authorities would never let them execute so many people, it seems. So rather than issue rulings that they could not act on, it was better just not to hear the case.

Another Talmudic source (Mishnah Makkot 1:10) seems to have a slightly different attitude:

So, what is Judaism’s attitude to capital punishment? What would it mean for Israeli society to enact the laws that Ben Gvir seeks? What would it mean for Israel’s standing in the world, or with Jews in the Diaspora?

We invited one of our regular guests, Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, to share with us a review of what the Jewish tradition says about the death penalty, and what factors he takes into consideration as he thinks about whether Ben Gvir’s drive to institute the death penalty for terrorists ought to go forward.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody is the executive director of Ematai and the Jewish Law Live columnist for the Jerusalem Post. He previously served as the founding director of the Tikvah Overseas Student Institute and co-dean of Tikvah Online Academy, a senior instructor at Yeshivat Hakotel, and as a junior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute.

Brody’s career has focused on making Jewish texts accessible to broader audiences while applying them to contemporary social and ethical dilemmas. His writings have been cited in Israeli Supreme Court decisions and have appeared in Mosaic, First Things, Tradition, The Federalist, Tablet, Tzohar, The Forward, Hakirah, Jewish Review of Books, and other popular publications.

His first book, A Guide to the Complex: Contemporary Halakhic Debates (Maggid), received a National Jewish Book Award. His second book, Ethics of Our Fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality, was published in January 2024 and will be published in Hebrew at the end of the year.

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, he received rabbinic ordination from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, an MA in Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University, and his PhD from Bar Ilan University Law School, where he continues to serve as a post-doctoral fellow. Rabbi Brody has been an invited scholar-in-residence at over 60 distinguished congregations and campuses in the United States, Canada, England, and Israel.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

I always love having today's guest, Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, on the podcast. I always love talking to him in general because invariably, I learn something that I didn't know before, and I think about things in ways that I hadn't before. I've asked Rabbi Brody in the middle of what's a very, very busy season for him and his organization, Ematai, which is dedicated to helping Jews navigate very complex ethical and moral dilemmas of aging, end of life care, organ donation, and so forth. It's a very busy time for him, but I asked him to come on nonetheless, and I appreciate his doing so, because there's a new issue in Israeli society that's getting batted around a little bit. It's getting batted around mostly in the person of Itamar Ben-Gvir, who, instead of wearing a little yellow ribbon on his lapel, as many people were, is wearing a little yellow, same size, but it's not a ribbon, it's actually a noose. It is rather unsubtle way of saying that he believes that there should be a death penalty in Israel for terrorists. The argument is very simple that when we hold these terrorists, invariably, sometimes, tragically, Israeli soldiers and/or civilians get captured, and then we pay horrendous prices for them, and we end up giving back very, very bad guys, Sinwar, being an obvious example.Therefore, argues Ben Gvir, but many others with him, by the way, that the way to make sure that we don't do that is just simply to kill them. If we know that they killed Jews, and they're terrorists, and they came here to kill us, and they did kill us, well, then we should just kill them, and we should institute the death penalty, which Israel, of course, has only used one time for Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi mass murderer. So there's really nobody better to talk to us about this issue than rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, who had a fascinating career here. He was with the Tikvah organization for a long time, and we'll put his exact roles in the written notes for today. He was a senior instructor at Yeshivat Hakotel, a fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. His work has been quoted in Israeli Supreme Court Decisions. The number of publications that he's published is endless. We'll put a whole bunch of them up in today's notes. He's written two books, which actually, I think, converge in today's topic. His first book was called A Guide to the Complex Contemporary Halakhic Debates, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 2014.In his most recent book, Ethics of Our fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality, was published in early 2024, just about two years ago. Our conversation today, really, I think, Rabbi Brody going to draw on what you wrote about in both of those books. I'll just note, even though we'll say it, soma cum laude graduate of Harvard College, rabbinic ordination from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, an MA in Jewish philosophy from Hebrew University, a PhD from Bar-Ilan University Law School. It goes on and on and on. He lives in Modine with his wife and children. Anyway, it's an incredibly impressive career that you've had, and you are always fascinating to learn from. You and I were chatting, I don't know, a month ago or so, and we were saying about how much things had actually changed in the world since the last conversation that we had, because we had a conversation before the ceasefire. We had a conversation before all the hostages were home. We're still waiting, of course, for one deceased hostage to come home, which is critically important. But the world is very different. It's better in some ways and not as much better as we would like in other kinds of ways.But this issue has sprout up since then. I reached out to you and I said, We should really talk about this. And there's nobody better to hear about this from than you, especially now that people like Ben Gvir and others are going to try very hard to make this a really serious issue. So I guess I would ask you to think ethically and halakhically. In other words, how Jews should think about this issue of instituting the death penalty by the State of Israel for specifically terrorists, terrorists like Nuhba terrorists who come across the border, pillage, murder, rape, kidnap, do all the worst possible things a human being can do. What should we do?Yeah, thanks so much for having me to have this conversation. It's a fascinating one, which, as you know, Ben Gvir is raised now, and it comes up, of course, because of the recent swaps and all those terrorists that we released. But it's been an issue that we've discussed for several years. I think in many ways, actually, right now, the figure that's really been pushing it politically for many years is a Avigdor Lieberman, who's currently in the opposition. But he's, I think, the actual sponsor of the bill, which made a very initial passing in the Knesset right now. I think to start off, we should separate out what we might call civil or regular penal type of criminal cases of death penalty, and we're dealing with public terror and a threat to the state. I grew up in Texas. In Texas, we had the death penalty. We, I think, have the death penalty. America is very unique in that respect in the West of having the death penalty with much controversy. Much of the controversy in part there is about the human rights and whether governments should put people to death. But the bigger controversy is the fact that we make mistakes. And DNA evidence has exonerated a lot of people sometimes before they're executed and sometimes after they're executed. That's a major, major issue. I have a lot of trouble with the death penalty in those circumstances, but that's not what we're talking about here.And I'll just add, by the way, if we just interject, I mean, even though we're not obviously talking about the American death penalty, one other issue that people raise is that there are certain subpopulations which are who are typically sentenced to death at a much greater rate than others. If you look at Blacks versus Whites, for example, for very similar crimes, studies have shown left and right that Blacks tend to be sentenced to death more frequently than Whites, which is another moral issue that people raise in America. Nothing to do with Israel. I just wanted to fill that out really quickly.I know, but it's important to raise that issue because one of the questions we even have in the Israeli system as well is that when you're thinking about enemies, are you going to be more inclined to do something which you wouldn't do against your own or someone else is more privileged where it might be? In the American case, it has to do with also access to proper legal defense of money, whatever it is, plus the biases you mentioned. In the Israeli case, part of the controversy of this most recent bill is that the bill is very explicit. It has to be an act of terror that's against the creation and existence of the state. Part of why they do that, wrote it that way, is that would more or less exclude what you might call Jewish terrorist. In other words, those who've had some incidents like that, unfortunately, much less often, but we have to acknowledge it. By the way, the law was written, which is problematic to some extent, or at least raised a lot of questions, it really basically apply against Arabs or other types of enemies against the state and not against Jewish terrorists.Just right off the bat, I bet actually it is important to bring up that issue. But once again, here in the United States, and here's a little bit less controversial, but I think it's helpful to make the parallel, you do have the federal death penalty for these types of incidents. One of the critical points here, I think we should think about this for our motivation, isn't just deterrence. It's just due punishment. These people did something really horrible. You could think of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Timothy McVeigh, and the Boston Marathon, and a couple of other of those types of incidents in which the death penalty was brought up, even in the Pittsburgh shooting in the Tree of Life Synagogue, the death has been invoked there as well. Those are types of cases where in the civil realm, those issues wouldn't come up because let's say it would be a plea bargain, whatever it might be, and you wouldn't have a plea, plead guilt, you wouldn't have it. But Here, the point is to say we don't have a question of the guilt here. Maybe they pleaded, maybe they admitted, maybe not. Either way, we think that this is a heinous crime, and people should die for this crime.That's part of the motivation here. I think that right away, though, that raises a lot of questions for Israel because, well, we have a lot of people in Israeli jails who did really heinous crimes against the State of Israel. How many of them are we executing? Just let's start. Let's think about the numbers here. All those Nuhba terrorists, it's quite a lot. Now, maybe not all of them were found to have done murders and this, that, rapes, whatever it is, but a whole lot of them. So right away, part of the question you have to ask is, are the numbers itself going to be something which is going to become problematic? It's interesting, the sages is actually bringing this up in the Talmud, where they talk about the idea that the entire idea of the death penalty became somewhat not really feasible once the number of murderers increased too much. I think the idea there in part was, can the system handle this? But also, is this really a form of deterrent when we're doing this? It becomes like everyday action. In Texas, where I grew up, we didn't think twice when on the news, you hear about a death penalty case or an execution, and it just happened a whole bunch of times every year. Then it becomes like trivial in some sense, but then what's the point? But of course, in our context, in Israeli context, nothing's going to be trivial. There's no such thing given the tension the world has on us. I think a part we should think about is like, Well, why are we doing this? What is it we're trying to accomplish I think someone like you raise the issue, and we can get into some of the different types of arguments, but right away when you raise the issue of the lapel, the Ben Gvir's lapel. It's provocative. It's meant to evoke, I think, problematically provocative. But one of the reasons why it's problematic besides, is it a desecration of the yellow label, not sensitive to the hostage families, and leaving all those serious issues aside, it also raises a question of, are you doing this because of justice or are you doing this because of revenge? In general, Danny, one of the things I'd say when I talk about military ethics or criminal legal ethics, whatever it is, is revenge is a very bad motivation.For almost anything.Yeah. Certainly in this realm, we have to be thinking very level-headed about why we're doing certain things. We actually have a very bad example of this in Israeli history. You mentioned Eichmann as indeed the person who got the death penalty. But in 1948, there was a man by the name of Meir Tobiansky, who was executed under a court martial by the nascent state of Israel, and then later found to be an exonerated, but he was dead. That was part of the politics of '48 and the Etzel, and the Haggana, this, that, and as you know well. That just right away should make us think and say, Okay, What are we doing this for? What is the motivation here? We need to be thinking about this in a very level-headed manner.Let me ask you a question. Let's talk about Jewish tradition for a second and take this. You mentioned the sages, obviously, which is obviously critical because we're in a Jewish state. There's a certain irony about people like Ben Gvir who represents the most religious persona, aside from the Haredim, in the government. A very big kippah and makes a very big point of making it clear that he dresses in a certain a way. There's a way in which you could argue that the rabbinic tradition is actually opposed to the death penalty. Now, it can't come out and say no death penalty because the Torah talks about a death penalty, and the rabbis, the sages, don't really have the right, quote, unquote, to say, Well, the Torah mandates it, but we're just not going to do it because we think we're more ethical than the Torah. That's not a possibility. But what we do, and obviously, you know this better than anybody, but what they do is they impose a whole series of requirements on the actual case to make sure that we know we're getting the right guy. So there there has to be warning, and the person has to acknowledge the warning, and the person has to say, Yes, I know that I will therefore become liable for the death penalty penalty and so on and so forth, to the point that not only does the Talmud say, as you pointed out before, that they had to stop doing the death penalty because it became so, there were so many people who deserved it. But the Talmud also says that a Sanhedrin that killed one person, was it in a generation or in 70 years, wherever it was, was considered a a killing Sanhedrin, which is to say basically they stopped doing the death penalty. You could argue that there's a current irony here that the person who was most the face of the religious worldview outside the Haredi world in the coalition or in the government is the person who actually seems to be ignoring the sources that he would be encountering if instead of being in the Knesset, which is his job, I'm not taking that away from him, and he was sitting in the Yeshiva somewhere learning Masechet Sanhedrin, the tractate of Sanhedrin, he'd be coming up against all the arguments not to do the death penalty. There's an irony here. How do you begin to untangle all of that?Well, I think the irony is really this selective use of sources. I'll explain what I mean by that. You are absolutely right. The Bible is full of death penalty. We're literally doing it, but when the rationale is both just dessert as well as deterrence. There's a strong strand in the rabbinic literature which is against it, imposes all sorts of circumstantial evidence requirements. Although even within the Talmud, there's a certain amount of pushback against that. But one of the Tana'ims says back, You guys, you're not eliminating death penalty. You're going to create a murder estate. There is already a little bit of debate of that. But what I actually find most fascinating is that medieval Jewish communities have the death penalty. This has been documented. It's been documented by an historian by the name of Simcha Assaf and others in more recently, Aron Kirshenbaum, who have shown that there have been many times when Jewish communities had a certain amount of autonomy, utilized the death penalty, particularly when they thought a member of the community was a real danger, not just because of the crime they're committing, but also a political danger.This was where? This was in Europe or this was in the East?No, mostly in Europe. Spain, you have cases in Spain, particularly, but you have cases in Ashkanazic countries as well.I said at the beginning, I always learned something from you whenever I talk to you. Here's a case in point. I had no idea about this, to tell you the truth. I mean, I find it fascinating. I find it fascinating from a the law of the land is the law. There's always been, I was always under the assumption that secular Gentiles authorities didn't allow Jews to execute people so that once we were out of our own sovereign situation, it was a theoretical issue only. But you're saying, no, that's not the case.We have a long Jewish history, and we have different types of situations with the Gentile authorities. Many times they wouldn't allow for our own penal system, but many times they would. They're like, Jews, you take care of this. Take care of your own, whatever it might be. We had reasons to do this, and particularly in order to make sure that we don't have the Gentile authorities who are hostile to us getting involved in our affairs. We sometimes had this power, and sometimes Jews executed other Jews. I mean, it's shocking in some ways, but that's sometimes what happened. Not always, but that is part of the tradition.I'm just curious. I mean, it's a little bit dark, but I'm just curious, what was the mode of execution? The Talmud talks about four modes of execution. What did they do? Did they hang them?They was hanging, there's execution, like guillotine. Whatever was in use at the time is what we could use. Obviously, everybody who's listening is realizing, of course, that the people that we executed in the Middle Ages, which, again, I didn't know, and that's why it's always so fascinating to talk to you, we were obviously executing Jews. I have to guess that there's not a way in the world that the local non-Jewish Spanish authorities are going to allow Jews to capture some Christian Spaniard who done whatever to the Jews and execute that person. Here we're talking about the exact opposite. Here we're talking about the case of executing a non-Jewish person for the crime of attacking Jewish people. Again, I didn't know that, but we had the power to execute very different circumstances.Exactly. I think that the the rabbinic and medieval precedents are complicated not only because they speak in different voices, which, of course, is common in our tradition, but they're dealing with the reality of the civil penal type of system, which has all sorts of problems with it. But here we're executing an enemy of the state. In my mind, the way we need to think about this is, okay, well, what's the reason for this? How is this beneficial for this state? Part of the The argument is a little bit, well, five seconds before we capture the guy, we're more than willing to kill him because he's a threat to us. Now that we've captured him, he's not a threat. So now the rules change. You have to think about this differently. And then the question is, what is his just desert here? In theory, it's supposed to be, let's say, life imprisonment. Now, that sometimes does happen, and there are people that certainly do die as criminals, as terrorists in prison. But because of all these lopsided prisoner swaps, we've been releasing a lot of these people, and that's where they've been pushing some of this conversation.In my mind, actually, before we even get to the question about the death penalty, I'd be asking, Well, maybe we should be rethinking about the laws allowing for clemency in these types of prisoner swaps. I mean, this lopsided nature of it, we're going to go and start executing terrorists because we don't know how to deal with that more fundamental issue, which we've been dealing with the last 40 years, but not well. Why aren't we thinking about laws which people like Yair Lapid introduced after the Shalit deal, but never got anywhere with it, which said we're going to limit the number of terrorists that can be released in these types of deals?Yeah. I mean, look, here I think Ben Gvir would say, and here I have to say, this is not a sentence that I say many times a week, I would agree with Ben Gvir. He would say, You know what? We could pass that law all we want. It's not going to make a difference at the end of the deal because the next time, A Gilad Shalit, God forbid, gets pulled out of his tank and gets held in Gaza five years. Parents were sitting in that little tent in front of the Prime Minister's house, which he doesn't live in right now, but it doesn't matter. They're sitting out there in this very central place on Bramban street in Jerusalem, we're not going to care what law we have. We're just not going to be able to do it. I mean, in an entirely different context. I mean, I have nothing to do with this. Part of it, and I don't want to sound elitist or giving the Jews too much of a pat on the back, but there's things that we're just not capable of doing. In other words, I was talking to a not Wilf who's also just recorded a podcast where she's starting a new political party called OZ, called strength.When it comes to the Haradim, she has a very simple view. You don't serve, you don't get services. I said to her, Well, that means like what? A 20-year-old guy who didn't go to the army all of a sudden wakes up with a massive headache. They do a scan. They find out that he's got a brain tumor. We say, I'm sorry, you're not covered. Either you fund it personally, I don't know where you're going to get the money, or you're just going to die. She said, Yeah, that would have to be the law. I said to her, it makes perfectly good logical sense, but there's not a way in the world the Jewish state is going to do that. We're not going to do that. We're not going to let Haredi kids go hungry, as enraged as I often am about Haredim, especially when my kid is in the north or my kid is in the south. The Haredim in this very neighborhood, across the street, across Emek Refaim, at the early Yeshiva there, are just loafing around, literally loathing around during the day, not even making a pretense of being in Yeshiva. My blood does boil. I mean, my blood does boil. But for you to ask me, would I have it in me to let their kids go hungry? I mean, I think not. Again, so passing, it's a long winter way of saying we could pass Yair Lapid's law, which again makes perfectly good sense. I just don't think we have the stomach for upholding it.You might be right. I wish that wasn't the case because then we get into a lot of other problems. Returning here to this solution of the death penalty. Okay, so why are we doing this? We said before, it's for the purposes of the state. So you have to ask, is this just dessert? Okay, you could argue this is just dessert. Now, one of the things that you often ask us, how are we going to decide Which of these terrorists get the death penalty?Because we're not going to kill all 1,000 Nuhba terrorists.Presumably not. Not just for diplomatic reasons. Are you going to go through the whole legal process for everyone? It's complicated. One of the immediate questions you have to ask is, how much are you really benefiting from having such a system as opposed to just saying life imprisonment, including, by the way, a question of how cozy the conditions have to be in the prison. I know there's a lot of reports about what Ben Gvir more recently did or didn't do in the past couple of years. I don't know exactly. I think that I don't have a clear picture of what types of luxuries or conditions he's changed there. But I do think that one of the things you have to ask is, is this really practical? The second really question you have to ask is, is this really going to be a deterrent? This has always been the military and intelligence services arguments against the death penalty. These are people who understand very well what these terrorists have done. They have no love for these people, but they're basically arguing that you're going to turn them into a Shahid, you're going to turn them into a martyr, you're going to make them celebrities and models and ways that are just It's going to be not helpful to us.I mean, these are people who have a little bit of a death wish many times. Now, the counterargument to that, and I want to take this seriously, is we should not minimize how much the Palestine society cares about its prisoners. They have a Ministry dedicated to helping the prisoners. They have the Pay for Slave program where people who are in prisons get supported and money in their families and whatnot. It could be that while we might say, all these people just want to die and have a death wish, actually, they don't really want to die. They actually want to be released and go home and live their lives.We also know, just to make your point even stronger, we know from hostages that when actually at Ben-Gvir's direction, the conditions of Nuhba terrorists in Israeli prisons were worsened, the conditions of the hostages were worsened. And the army told them, it's what's going to happen. In other words, you start putting restrictions on Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons, you're going to make life even more hellish and miserable for the Israeli hostages. And we know from the ones that came out alive and have talked about it that the actual guards told them, We're now doing this because we just heard that Ben Gvir said to do X, Y, and Z in the prisons, which only strengthens your argument.Right. That's all his question. But there, I actually think that there's a lot of questions we ask about the conditions that we've given to Palestine terrorists in the past. But part of also the problem with Ben Gvir is he does little and says much. I think one of actually someone, Eitan Mor's father, Zvika Mor, Eitan Mor is a hostage. His father, who lives in Kriyat Arba, not really accused of being a left winger, said about, you know, Ben-Gvir, you do things and you don't talk about it. But just as a general aside, this is something which Israeli politicians should learn more about. Talk less, do more. Don't say, We're going to starve them. We're not going to bring any food in when you're not really going to do that. If you're going to do that, don't say you did it. You have to be thinking. But the thing about the death penalty is you can't not make that a public spectacle. It's not something which you can't really control. Here, I find the argument to be very suspect to say that this is really going to be a deterrence. Now, the new head of the Shabach, who came from outside the system, the Israeli Security Services, has reportedly, although I haven't seen him really say this, given his explanation, say he it could be helpful.Once again, but here I ask in both directions, is this really a level-headed military strategic analysis that's driving that position? Or in both directions, are we being driven by ideology? Whether it's because of human rights factors or your vision of a criminal law system, you don't believe in a death penalty, or do you really think like, No, this really isn't going to be a deterrent? And vice versa. I'm very nervous that the motivation here by some of the players, not all, but some of the players who are supporting the death penalty here is much more about revenge and anger and just like, I want these people to be dead.Well, it's also political populism, to be quite honest. That's the reason that you say a lot and do little is because you're actually much more focused on what people think you're going to do or you're positioning yourself in the electoral spectrum somewhere, which, by the way, we see in American politics, thank God, too. I say thank God only in the sense that we don't look worse. But there's a lot of that going on in the States, too.And the populism here is so dangerous because you have consequences to these types of actions, which could be really, really dangerous. In terms of the conditions, well, the conditions It's going to be different? I mean, our hostages were held in horrible conditions no matter what Ben Gvir was doing to the Palestinian terrorists there. I mean, maybe a little bit worse in the days. I'm not belittling that. But that is, I think, a little bit less of a concern that I have as much as just like, Is this really going to be helpful? That's why I'm coming back to the point of this isn't a regular criminal type of case. This is about protecting the state and the broader state interest. What is the state interest here? In my mind, we have a state interest to keeping people in jail, not releasing them, as I mentioned before, and I know I'm against these lopsided swaps. But in my mind We have to be smart about how we handle these cases and not do things that are just going to cause a greater amount of celebration of Palestinian martyrdom. That's something which we can't really afford to be populist about.Let me just ask by way of beginning to wrap up. Let's imagine we're going to have elections in sometime in 2026. I mean, that's what the law calls for, at least. They may come earlier, they may come as late as October, but barring anything radically unforeseen, we're going to have elections. Let's imagine, either Bibi wins, but he wins and makes a deal with the likes of Lieberman and others, and so he can do it without his far right flank. He can dump Smotrich, and he can dump Tali Gottlieb, and he can dump Ben Gvir, people that are giving him massive headaches these days that he would just love to be done with. But a Bibi is a Bibi restored to the Bibi of old. I don't know if that Bibi is still there, but let's just say, hypothetically, that he is. Or you get somebody like Lieberman, who has never been accused of being a left winger, who's also never been accused of being religious. He's hyper secular, hyper right. You could have Yair Lapid, I think the likelihood of that is very small. But we're a Bennett who is actually himself personally observant, whatever.You could have a lot of different people. Somebody calls you in and says, Listen, we want you to just whisper. You're an Orthodox rabbi. You care a lot about halakhic issues. You care a lot about Jewish ethics. You've thought a lot about Israel and war and public moral and ethical dilemmas. Bottom line, is this something that we should pursue and examine and take seriously or should be, because of all the complications, just let this thing wither on the vine because there's nothing good that's going to come out of pushing it forward? What would you whisper in this future Prime Minister's ear?Yeah, that's a great question. Here's my answer. The Jewish tradition brings into the conversation here a number of critical values, the ones that we've been talking about here, both in terms of history and in terms of our ethics and our law. You, as a Prime Minister, need to weigh these types of values, just desert and deterrence and security and dealing with the questions of revenge. You need to analyze in a very level-headed manner, what is the motivation here? I think Jewish law, you can make an argument, can support a lot of the sides here, but that's irrelevant. If you're just choosing one position and saying, I want this is based on Jewish law, you're missing the richness of the tradition. The richness of the tradition here isn't saying, The Bible says kill people, the sages say don't. No, the richness of the tradition is to say we have a number of values here. Let's analyze this based on these values and figure out what we should do, what's the most prudent thing for the state of Israel in this moment. My own read of the situation is that I don't really see advantage to this. I see a lot of risk to this. I'm very skeptical about it. But that doesn't mean you as the Prime Minister were, of course, better sight of what all the different geopolitical and diplomatic and security factors, you should make an analysis based on these values. But do me a favor and don't just grab a little quote from the Bible or the sages and say, This is the Jewish view of something. It's a lot more complex. We saw this with a lot of issues recently with the question of the prisoner swaps and many other things, and many other things. The Jewish tradition is much richer than a sound bite.Right. I mean, with the redemption of captives, there are a lot of T-shirts walking around. I mean, people were wearing them. There's no greater mitzvah than redeeming captives. But as you point out, there are a lot of counter examples of the Meir of Rothenburg who refuse to be ransomed and so on and so forth. It's all very complicated. The conversation that you're urging us to have, of course, is the conversation that we need to restore to Israeli discourse on everything, from economics to security to education, to how we treat each other in the streets, and so on and so forth. But to hear from someone who's an expert, both in the ethical side and the halakhic side, and who comes to this in the perspective of somebody who thinks a lot about Israeli policy, but is also an Orthodox rabbi, I think, is a really interesting opportunity for us just to get a little bit of a sense of the complexity of the issue and the ways that people are thinking about it and the ways that people ought to think about it. So once again, rabbi Dr. Shlomo Brody, thank you very much for taking the time. What we both know is a very, very busy, busy week for you. Wish you tremendous success with all the stuff that you're working on. Thank you for illuminating this issue for us, and I look forward to our next conversation.Thank you so much.

We were on the road to Tel Aviv yesterday, and traffic was massively backed up. This guy clearly wasn’t going to make it to his destination in time to recite shacharit by the latest time permitted. So, only in Israel.

(Photos by me; rest assured, my wife was driving….)

The video at the very top of this brief column, which was posted to Instagram on the Kan News Instagram feed, may seem rather innocuous, but we’re posting it for a number of reasons.

* First, tomorrow’s podcast, with Rabbi Shlomo Brody, an expert on Judaism, war and ethics, will address the push on the political right to institute the death penalty for terrorists. Itamar Ben Gvir, our readers have almost certainly noticed, has taken to wearing a lapel pin that has not the yellow ribbon for the hostages, but a yellow noose for the terrorists—yet another Ben Gvir classy move.

* Second, while the video sets the stage for tomorrow’s podcast, it’s also an opportunity to introduce an Israeli journalist with whom many of our readers may well not be familiar.

Suleiman Maswadeh is a prominent Israeli-Arab journalist currently serving as the senior political correspondent for Kan 11, Israel’s public broadcasting corporation. Born on July 13, 1995, and raised in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, he grew up in a traditional environment where Hebrew was not commonly spoken. He initially pursued accounting at Birzeit University but decided to pivot his career after realizing the importance of Hebrew for integration and professional success in Israel. He subsequently completed an intensive language program and earned a degree in Politics and Communication from Hadassah Academic College.

His professional rise within Israeli media has been rapid. Maswadeh began his career at Kan as a student producer for the Arabic-language channel before transitioning to the Hebrew-language news desk. He served as a Jerusalem correspondent and an Arab affairs reporter before being promoted to his current role as a political correspondent and anchor. In this capacity, he covers high-profile topics including the Prime Minister’s Office, government cabinet meetings, and Israel’s diplomatic relations. His work has earned him professional recognition, including a “special award of excellence” from his alma mater in 2023.

Maswadeh is often cited for his unique position as a Palestinian-Israeli journalist navigating complex societal divides. He has spoken openly about the challenges of his role, including receiving death threats and facing criticism from both Jewish and Arab communities when his reporting is perceived as unfavorable to either side. Despite these pressures, he has expressed a commitment to objective reporting, stating that he intentionally avoids being “an Arab covering Arabs” to ensure his work spans the full spectrum of Israeli political and social life.

He currently resides in Tel Aviv and has held Israeli citizenship since February 2024.

We will, in the next several weeks, post several podcasts about the state of democracy in Israel. It’s not all pretty—and yet, at the same time, it’s worth taking note of the phenomenon of Suleiman Maswadeh, who’s been a citizen of Israel for less than two years, taking on a senior minister of the government, seemingly with no concerns whatsoever.

Nothing about that should blind us to the genuine threats to Israelis democracy (and Israel is hardly alone). But still, unlike other countries, this is not a place where the fact that a journalist makes the government unhappy leads to the government shutting him down.

And in advance of tomorrow’s conversation with Shlomo Brody, it’s worth thinking about the following:

* Does Israel really want a law the institutes the death penalty for terrorists that would be directed at Arab terrorists but not Jewish killers?

* Given Israel’s pariah status in the world, how much would it serve Israel to have the world watching us execute the Nukhba terrorists of October 7? Would it make matters worse? Would it not make a difference? Should we not care?

* Hundreds of Palestinians murdered Israelis on October 7. How many should Israel execute if the law were to pass? One? One hundred? Five hundred?

There’s been a lot written on this already; good introductions are the Times of Israel here:

or, if one cares what the international community is saying, then this from JURIST, here:

We will pick up this subject tomorrow.

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Uvdah first aired on Channel 2 during the very first week of Israel’s commercial television in 1993 (before that, Israeli television had been dominated by a single state-run channel). Uvdah is the only Israeli program to have remained on the air continuously for over 30 years (with a brief hiatus in 2001–2002).

Uvdah is hosted by Ilana Dayan, a huge talent. Born in Argentina, she immigrated to Israel as a child and began her media career during her military service as the first female soldier-correspondent for Army Radio (Galei Tzahal). Alongside her journalism, she pursued an extensive legal education, earning a doctorate in law from Yale University. She remains active in academia as a lecturer on constitutional law and freedom of speech at Tel Aviv University. Throughout her career, she has received numerous accolades for her work, including the Sokolov Prize and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, cementing her status as a leading figure in Israeli public discourse.

Uvdah has recently produced several episodes about former hostages that have stunned the nation; the latest, released on December 25 is a long interview with released hostage, Romi Gonen, who was kidnapped from the Nova.

In this episode, the interview was conducted by Ben Shani.​ Shani is a documentary filmmaker and a journalist, and a member of the editorial staff of UVDA. As a filmmaker, Shani has won two Israeli Academy Awards, as well as (like Ilana Dayan) the Sokolov Prize.

Shani accompanied Gonen over months, capturing her story from hospital recovery through her return home.​

The episode aired on December 25, 2025, detailing Gonen’s 471 days in Hamas captivity, including sexual assaults by four captors. In the last few days, a version of the interview with English subtitles has suddenly made its way around Israeli social media, including (among others) on Facebook and on Substack.

The interview, painful but not in any way graphic, deserves to be closely watched by everyone seeking to understand what the hostages endured, and the nature of the scars Israeli society will carry with it for as long into the future as we can see.

As is evident even in the above brief clip, Romi Gonen’s extraordinary courage, during her captivity and since, speaks for itself. Beyond her interview with Ben Shani, there’s really nothing else that needs to be said.

The full episode is above.

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I don’t know how many people noticed the story that JTA carried on December 18 (and that was subsequently picked up numerous outlets), Judaism’s Conservative movement apologizes for decades of discouraging intermarriage.

I’ll confess to having been stunned by the story. Not that the Conservative movement embracing intermarriage would be a surprise—some leading Conservative rabbis having been push in that direction for quite some time, and with the numbers of Conservative congregations and members both tanking precipitously, the movement is in a tough spot.

What surprised me was the apology.

“We acknowledge that our movement’s historical stance has resulted in hurt, alienation, and disconnection from our community. We deeply apologize,” the report said.

This was not a “we’re going to try a different approach because we now read Jewish law differently,” or “we’re going to change our policies because the changing times mandate a shift in our stance.” This was an apology for having tried to … to do what? I would argue that the policy against intermarriage has been a central pillar of maintaining Judaism’s tribal nature.

We’re a tribe. We might be comfortable with that idea, or we might not. But before a religion or a culture or a civilization or a state—we’re a tribe.

Defending that dimension of Jewish life has becoming increasingly difficult in a world in which young people, Jews definitely among them, find tribal sentiments either foreign, or outright objectionable. That’s why I reached out to Professor Moshe Koppel, whose book, Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures, is an elegant and compelling—and very approachable—discussion of this topic.

Particularly after October 7 and all that’s transpired both in Israel and in the Diaspora, hearing from this American who is now Israeli and thus understands both communities seemed particularly important.

Koppel’s book has been out a few years. I enjoyed it very much when it first appeared, and then re-read it as “tribalness” has recently become so contentious. I asked him to join us to discuss the ideas that are central to his book.

Our listeners may recall that Professor Koppel has been on the podcast before. One of the leading public intellectuals arguing for judicial reform, he joined us to discuss that issue twice.

The first was here:

while the second part of that conversation was here:

Professor Koppel also came on the podcast to speak about Israel’s very controversial nation-state law, and why he endorsed it:

A powerful and engaging intellect, Moshe Koppel never shies away from the tough questions. In today’s conversation, we leave law and politics aside, and speak about his take on what Judaism is going to have to look like, if it is to survive.

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Prof. Moshe Koppel serves as chairman of Kohelet Policy Forum.

He received his PhD in mathematics from Courant Institute and did post-doctoral work in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Koppel’s main areas of research in computer science include machine learning and social choice theory. His work on authorship attribution is widely put to use in commercial, legal and security applications.

Koppel made aliyah in 1980.

Koppel has also published two books and many articles on Rabbinic literature, with special emphasis on logic and probability. He co-founded and co-edited the journal Higayon, devoted to these topics.

Koppel’s political activity includes co-drafting two proposed constitutions for Israel, one in collaboration with Michael Eitan, then Chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee. Several law proposals drafted by Prof. Koppel have been passed into law by the Knesset.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

When does an immigrant become an Israeli? When they have a perfect Israeli accent? When their Hebrew is every bit as good as their “mother tongue”? When they no longer go back to visit the country from which they came? When their kids have done the army?

Or when they’re buried here?

Or, perhaps, never?

I still recall a story told to me by Professor Seymour Fox, z’l, who as the head of the Mandel Foundation’s work in Israel, was the one who made our aliyah possible by hiring me when we first decided to stay. Seymour told me about a panel at Hebrew University which he’d been invited to join.

Fox had come to Israel in 1967, had raised his kids here, they’d all gone to the army, he’d been the head of the School of Education at Hebrew University—and on and on. He told me that someone was putting together a panel at Hebrew U, and they’d asked him and one other person, who happened to be a foreigner, to participate. Then, this person told Professor Fox, “Now we have to get an Israeli for the program.”

I can still see Seymour’s face—somewhere between very annoyed and actually angry—as he related the story. “When am I going to be Israeli?”, he told me he had asked the person putting the panel together. He reminded her that he’d been in Israel for almost half a century. His kids had done the army. What he didn’t say, but she knew, was that he’d left a deep mark on the School of Education at Hebrew U and, in collaboration with Mort Mandel, was doing more than perhaps anyone in the world to further Diaspora educational leadership by training people in Jerusalem.

“What do they want from me?”, he said to me.

Fox was not the kind of person one trifled with, and people were usually very careful to treat him with great respect. This woman who was putting the panel together hadn’t meant to insult him—it was as obvious to her that he wasn’t Israeli as it was obvious to him that he was.

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We went out to dinner last Thursday night with our niece, who’s visiting from the States for a few weeks. As we were getting ready to leave the restaurant, I quipped to my wife and my niece, “Nice having Christmas dinner with you.” Our niece was stunned. “Wow. It’s Christmas. I’d totally forgotten. I love that you don’t even know it’s Christmas here.”

Had we been in Tel Aviv, though, she might not have said that. Because for some Israelis, this week is actually the week of a very important holiday—the Russian holiday of Novy God.

What’s true of Christmas is not as true of New Year’s Eve, which even though it’s not nearly as big a deal here as it is abroad, is still a “thing.” We’re invited to a New Year’s Eve party—is that further indication that we’re not really Israeli?

In the Soviet Union, in which all religious observance was stifled, non-religious celebrations assumed a great deal of importance—people of every culture, after all, need to celebrate at times. For Russian Israelis, birthdays are a very, very big deal, because they were in the USSR, as well. The Soviets could stifle religion, but they couldn’t really stop people from celebrating birthdays.

It’s thus no surprise that in that setting, secular “holiday” festivals also cropped up. Novy God is perhaps the prime example. In the 1930’s, the Soviet regime appropriated certain celebrations as part of its policy to suppress religious holidays, particularly Christmas, and in their stead, created a secular, civic alternative approved by the communist authorities.

Anyone from a Western country who watches the video at the top of this post will immediately recognize what seems to us like Christmas imagery. A character who looks like Santa. Winter imagery. The “Yolka,” an evergreen tree. And more.

It’s precisely the fact that the Christmas-like roots of the holiday are obvious that made Novy God a bit of a controversial issue in Israel for a while. After all, many Israelis (certainly in Jewish cities, even secular ones) see it as a badge of pride that you can be here and not know it’s Christmas.

When the large wave of Russian immigrants arrive in Israel, especially during the 1990s, Novy God came, too. For these immigrants, the holiday became a significant cultural practice, an identity-affirming and nostalgic celebration. Yet what Russian immigrants saw as a wholly secular tradition struck many Israelis as crossing a line that they did not want crossed. Strangely, this led to a Marano-like practice, in which Jews from the Soviet Union who had come “home” to the country where they could ostensibly be who they really were, felt that they had to keep their celebrations behind closed doors; they thus celebrated privately around tables laden with champagne and delicacies in living rooms decorated with lights, tinsel, and their fir tree, the “Yolka.”

Slowly, though, things began to shift. By the late 2010s, high-level Israeli politicians including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog began releasing videos wishing members of the Russian-speaking community “S Novim Godom” (Happy New Year in Russian).

That, though, is good for votes. What is perhaps a bit more surprising is that in 2022, when Novy God took place on Shabbat, Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, a religious kibbutz in southern Israel, held a special Novy God Shabbat featuring candle lighting and zakuski—a traditional Russian combination of alcohol and Russian small plates.

That would certainly seem like progress—an openness to the traditions of Jewish immigrants to Israel, wherever they come from, just as has slowly but steadily happened with the Moroccan Mimouna or the Ethiopian Jews’ Sigd (which are widely recognized—particularly the Mimouna, as more than half of Israel’s Jews are Mizrachi, and it’s been widely adopted).

But it’s not really as simple as that, obviously. For what strikes Russian immigrants as a perfectly secular moment of joy has imagery that strikes many Westerners as distinctly Christian, even if that’s not at all the intent. Had there been lots of Novy God symbolism across Jerusalem (which there isn’t—there’s a lot more in Tel Aviv), my niece would probably have assumed that it was Christmas-related; nothing wrong with that, but she wouldn’t have been struck by how utterly different this place is.

So, embrace Novy God? Shun it?

That’s a decision we may not have to make.

With time, one of two things is likely to happen. One possibility is that Novy God will disappear as subsequent generations of Israelis of Russian descent care about it a lot less (we still do Thanksgiving—on Friday night, not Thursday—but it’s our grandchildren who love it, while our kids pretty much couldn’t care less). Or, alternatively, Novy God will take on some Israelis characteristics that we can’t yet predict. Here and there in Tel Aviv these days, one sees (in a mall, quite often) a display featuring a fir tree adorned with a Star of David. In the States, someone would probably assume that it was Jews for Jesus; here, it’s just Jews still trying to figure out how to make home feel like home.

Umberto Cassuto, more commonly known as Moshe David Cassuto (1883–1951), was an Italian historian, rabbi and biblical scholar. Cassuto argued that tzitzit, the fringes that traditional Jewish men wear (sometimes under their clothing, sometimes out), had Egyptian roots. Fringes and tassels, he claimed, were a known status symbol in ancient Egypt, often associated with nobility or high office. Thus, by commanding the Israelites to wear tzitzit (Numbers 15:37–41), he suggested, the Torah was essentially democratizing a symbol of dignity and elevated status; the commandment to wear tzitzit was the Torah’s way of arguing that it was all of Israel, not just a few select Egyptians, who were nobility, or royalty.

It’s not clear if Cassuto was right. But if he was, then a Novy God tree with a Jewish star on top is part of a dynamic as old as Judaism itself.

Perhaps, then, it’s finally time this week to embrace immigrants from the former USSR and this year, and say

S Novim Godom.

When Arthur Hertzberg first published his magnus opus, The Zionist Idea, in 1959, all it took was a quick glance at the Table of Contents to get a sense of how varied, profound and extensive had been the exchange of ideas in Zionist circles. In the decades that have followed his book, a great deal has been written about Zionism, but there’s no doubt that the greatest days of thinking about the ideas of Zionism had unfolded before statehood.

To this day, there is no better introduction to the ideas at the core of Zionism than the approximately 85 page Introduction to that volume. It’s not light reading, but very little that is truly important is.

An updated version of that book, The Zionist Ideas, edited by Gil Troy, does an admirable job of illustrating how the conversation has continued, but even Troy would be the first to acknowledge that profound, ideas-based Zionist thinking today pales relative to what it was in the first decades of the twentieth century.

One important exception to that claim is Dr. Einat Wilf, who—to my mind—is one of the stellar thinkers about Zionism today. Formerly a person of the the Israeli left, Wilf has had the courage to rethink some of her previous commitments, and today, pulls no punches when it comes to articulating what she believes it will take to move this region to a brighter era.

As we’ll hear in today’s conversation, Wilf has recently launched a new political party—not left, not right, but something different. It’s called OZ (Strength), and in today’s conversation, she explains what it stands for.

A full list of her books is online, but here are some of the recent ones with which to begin:

* The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace

* Telling Our Story: Recent Essays on Zionism, the Middle East, and the Path to Peace

* We Should All Be Zionists: Essays on the Jewish State and the Path to Peace

* Winning the War of Words: Essays on Zionism and Israel

For the OZ party’s website in English, click here.

Wilf has also helped create a truly monumental movie about UNWRA. After watching it, it’s hard to recall how little we knew about UNWRA before.

Here is a trailer:

For those in Israel the movie in available on YouTube (just below). For those outside Israel, because the video below is geo-locked, there is a paid VOD option, more than well worth the few dollars.

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Dr. Einat Wilf is a leading thinker on Israel, Zionism, foreign policy and education. She was a member of the Israeli Parliament from 2010 to 2013, where she served as Chair of the Education Committee and Member of the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Born and raised in Israel, Dr. Wilf served as an Intelligence Officer in the Israel Defense Forces, Foreign Policy Advisor to Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres and a strategic consultant with McKinsey & Company.

Dr. Wilf has a BA from Harvard, an MBA from INSEAD in France, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Cambridge. She was the Goldman Visiting Professor at Georgetown University.

Dr. Wilf is the author of seven books that explore key issues in Israeli society. We Should All Be Zionists, published in 2022, brings together her essays from the past four years on Israel, Zionism and the path to peace; the co-authored The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, was published in 2020.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

In the conversation that we’re posting today, as we wrap up four conversations devoted to different themes of Hanukkah, Shalom Lamm said something that in retrospect seems obvious, but that I’d never thought of before we sat down to speak about Operation Benjamin.

When a family chooses to have their fallen IDF son or daughter buried at Mount Herzl, they are making a conscious decision that that son or daughter will not be buried with the rest of the family. They must choose whether to bury their loved close to home, or with his or her comrades. As we know, many choose military cemeteries over family plots.

When it comes to US servicemen, the military cemetery is not an hour or two away, but across the ocean. As we hear from Shalom Lamm, many of the Jewish veterans of World War I and World War II were buried in Europe, but without any indication that the men resting there were Jews. And often, no one from the family has ever come to visit the grave. It’s almost certain that no one has ever said Kaddish at that grave.

And strange though it may sound, there are World War II American GI’s buried in Israel, too; how did that happen, and what’s the status of those graves?

That, too, is part of the story of Operation Benjamin.

Shalom Lamm describes for us how this cause of setting the historical record straight became a driving force in his life, and explains to us what Operation Benjamin does.

Here’s a brief introduction from CNN:

To learn more about Operation Benjamin and the Jewish soldiers whose memory it sanctifies, we invite you to visit the Operation Benjamin website.

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We’ve marked Hanukkah this year with four podcast conversations, each related to one dimension of what the holiday is about. Here are the posts:

Monday: Kalanit Turgeman is the sister of Dalia Emanuelof. Dalia’s son, Dvir, was the first Israeli solder killed in Operation Cast Lead, in January 2009. Kalanit shared the story of her nephew Dvir, the tragedy of his falling, and a miracle of sorts that followed. You can see that post here.

Wednesday: Israel is a land of modern day Maccabees. Our younger generation showed that they are made of the very best that the Jewish people has ever produced. My colleague at Shalem College, Dr. Ido Hevroni, shares how teaching war-saturated classics like the Iliad and the Odyssey to young people who have just returned from battle is different from teaching it to anyone else. Only in Israel can these conversations unfold. You can see that post here.

Friday: We are used to thinking about Hanukkah as being about a battle for the religious freedoms that foreign powers had sought to steal from us. But what about when we have to battle our own leaders for religious freedom? Rabbi Shaul Farber, founder and CEO of Itim, speaks about the surge of interest in Jewish expression in post-October-7 Israel, and the irony that it risks being snuffed out by our own religious authorities. You can see that post here.

Todays: Jews have fought bravely not only in Israel’s wars, but in armies across the world. Far too often, Jewish soldiers were buried with nothing to indicate that they were Jews. Shalom Lamm, who heads Operation Benjamin, speaks about the sacred search for those graves and the delicate work with local governments to honor these men as Jews. Contrary to what we might expect, there are such graves in Israel, too. Lamm explains how that could possibly be.

Rabbi Dr. Lamm has served as a member of the Board of Directors at Yeshiva College, was President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Camp Morasha and was a member of the Board of Directors of The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). He was one of the 4 founders of the Hatzoloh Medical Rescue squad on the West Side of Manhattan. Lamm has served as an active member of the Chevra Kadisha (Jewish burial society) for over 40 years. Today, he serves as one of the driving forces of Operation Benjamin.

Lamm is a graduate of Yeshiva University (BA, Philosophy) and the American Military University (MA with honors, US Military History with a concentration in Civil War studies). He has lectured and published articles and essays and been a motion picture on-air historian on a wide range of topics including educational public policy, the U.S. Civil War, Purity of Arms and warfare policy.

In June 2024, Shalom Lamm was awarded the President’s Great Medal of Honor from the German War Graves Commission. This was only the 11th time this award has been issued since the founding of the Volksbund.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s podcast conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

A headline on yesterday’s Times of Israel might have made you blink. In the midst of everything going on in Israel, the Knesset is pursuing legislation that would criminalize “interference” with “Orthodox religious practices”?

What constitutes “interference”? Which public practices?

And most importantly, why? What’s the agenda here?

The issue had already hit the Israeli press in Hebrew a few weeks earlier. Two weekends ago, Makor Rishon published an interview with Rabbi Seth Farber, who has been on the IFTI podcast before, about precisely this issue.

The headline below reads:

“The chairman of the ITIM organization warns: The wave of religion-and-state legislation is harming the Jewish awakening”

“Most of us want tradition, but not with the state shoving it into our faces with a punch.” Rabbi Dr. Shaul Farber in an interview ahead of the ITIM–Makor Rishon conference that will take place next week.”

We invited Rabbi Farber to explain to us what’s at stake, and why, in a Jewish country, the Parliament feels it has to work to preserve Jewish practice.

We have been fortunate to have Rabbi Farber as a guest on the podcast, on different subjects, in the past. If you’re interested in those conversations, take a look at:

* “The Chief Rabbinate’s policies have no precedent in Jewish law” (Jan 2023)

* Israel’s unique socialized medical system -- what happens when what you need isn’t covered? How does Israel decide what’s “in”? (April 2023)

* Israel is going to feel a different kind of responsibility for Jews around the world (Nov 2023)

* Will Israel finally get a Zionist Chief Rabbi? Despite a deal, it’s not so clear, explains Rabbi Seth Farber (Jun 2024)

* “What this country needs is a vision of who we want to be” (Jan 2025)

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

We’re marking Hanukkah this year with four podcast conversations, each related to one dimension of what the holiday is about. Here is our schedule:

Monday: Kalanit Turgeman is the sister of Dalia Emanuelof. Dalia’s son, Dvir, was the first Israeli solder killed in Operation Cast Lead, in January 2009. Kalanit shared the story of her nephew Dvir, the tragedy of his falling, and a miracle of sorts that followed. You can see that post here.

Wednesday: Israel is a land of modern day Maccabees. Our younger generation showed that they are made of the very best that the Jewish people has ever produced. My colleague at Shalem College, Dr. Ido Hevroni, shares how teaching war-saturated classics like the Iliad and the Odyssey to young people who have just returned from battle is different from teaching it to anyone else. Only in Israel can these conversations unfold. You can see that post here.

Today: We are used to thinking about Hanukkah as being about a battle for the religious freedoms that foreign powers had sought to steal from us. But what about when we have to battle our own leaders for religious freedom? Rabbi Shaul Farber, founder and CEO of Itim, speaks about the surge of interest in Jewish expression in post-October-7 Israel, and the irony that it risks being snuffed out by our own religious authorities.

Sunday: Jews have fought bravely not only in Israel’s wars, but in armies across the world. Far too often, Jewish soldiers were buried with nothing to indicate that they were Jews. Shalom Lamm, who heads Operation Benjamin, speaks about the sacred search for those graves and the delicate work with local governments to honor these men as Jews. Contrary to what we might expect, there are such graves in Israel, too. Lamm explains how that could possibly be.

Rabbi Seth Farber is the founder and director of ITIM: The Jewish Life Information Center, an organization which seeks to help individuals navigate Jewish life in Israel. He serves as the founding rabbi of Kehilat Netivot in Raanana where he lives with his wife Michelle and their five children. Rabbi Farber received his PhD from the Hebrew University and his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. He is the author of An Amercian Orthodox Dreamer: Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Boston’s Maimonides School.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s podcast conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

When I was a freshman at Columbia, a long time ago, we read—as Columbia students have for a century—the Iliad and the Odyssey in our very first semester. I was an eighteen year old kid from a nice, quiet, suburban neighborhood. I made my way through the books and more or less understood them—or so I thought—but given my fortunate and sheltered life until that point, while I “understood” the war scenes in the books, they certainly didn’t touch anything in the core of my soul.

As we hear today, from my colleague at Shalem College, Dr. Ido Hevroni, reading the Iliad and the Odyssey with Israeli students is now a very different experience—because many of them have recently returned from fighting in battles just as harrowing as those Homer describes. In fact, as Hevroni relates, one of the students he’d taught the Iliad to as a freshmen was killed on October 7, in a fierce battle, just days before the academic year would have started—and instead of welcoming Amir back to campus, Hevroni spoke at his grave.

Why should we be interested in how Israeli students respond to these texts?

Because hearing how young Israeli students relate so differently to books that westerners have been reading for hundreds of years affords us a window into their lives, into their souls and into the country they will soon shape, which is, of course, the purpose of IFTI.

As Hanukkah marks, in part, the accomplishment of devoted Jewish fighters, this seemed like a very appropriate week for us to hear from Ido Hevroni about this generation’s Maccabees.

Links to a few items we mention in the conversation:

In today’s podcast, we refer to a few resources you might like to link to. We mention the work of Joseph Campbell and quote a passage of his about mythologies of war and peace, which he wrote not long after the Six Day War (and in response to it). You can hear Campbell himself discuss that piece in Joseph Campbell: Mythology of Wars and Peace.

We also mention Udi Kagan’s fabulous stand-up comedy routine, which is funny but also heartbreaking—as it’s about his PTSD that followed his fighting in a different one of Israel’s wars. You can find that episode and the subtitled video of Kagan’s performance at Body and Soul: Remarkable Stories of Recovery.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

We’re marking Hanukkah this year with four podcast conversations, each related to one dimension of what the holiday is about. Here is our schedule:

Monday: Kalanit Turgeman is the sister of Dalia Emanuelof. Dalia’s son, Dvir, was the first Israeli solder killed in Operation Cast Lead, in January 2009. Kalanit shared the story of her nephew Dvir, the tragedy of his falling, and a miracle of sorts that followed. You can see that post here.

Today: Israel is a land of modern day Maccabees. Our younger generation showed that they are made of the very best that the Jewish people has ever produced. My colleague at Shalem College, Dr. Ido Hevroni, shares how teaching war-saturated classics like the Iliad and the Odyssey to young people who have just returned from battle is different from teaching it to anyone else. Only in Israel can these conversations unfold.

Friday: We are used to thinking about Hanukkah as being about a battle for the religious freedoms that foreign powers had sought to steal from us. But what about when we have to battle our own leaders for religious freedom? Rabbi Shaul Farber, founder and CEO of Itim, speaks about the surge of interest in Jewish expression in post-October-7 Israel, and the irony that it risks being snuffed out by our own religious authorities.

Sunday: Jews have fought bravely not only in Israel’s wars, but in armies across the world. Far too often, Jewish soldiers were buried with nothing to indicate that they were Jews. Shalom Lamm, who heads Operation Benjamin, speaks about the sacred search for those graves and the delicate work with local governments to honor these men as Jews. Contrary to what we might expect, there are such graves in Israel, too. Lamm explains how that could possibly be.

Dr. Ido Hevroni is chair of the David and Judith Lobel Core Curriculum and a senior lecturer at Shalem College.

Previously the college’s founding educational director, he is a scholar of rabbinic literature and teaches Talmud and Midrash, classical literature, and theories of depth psychology. He is among Israel’s leading experts on liberal arts education and frequently grants master classes on pedagogy.

Hevroni formerly served as academic director of the Shalem IDF Educational Leadership Program and as an associate dean at the Mandel School for Educational Leadership, and currently serves as a volunteer lecturer for various IDF units and pre-military preparatory schools.

His research and writing connect the practical and realistic aspects of metal craft (i.e., blacksmithing and gold-smithing) with the conceptual depths of Talmudic and classical literature.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s podcast conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

I was first in touch with Dalia Emanuelof, the mother of Dvir Emanuelof ז”ל, back in 2009. I actually heard about her from a man who was then my regular taxi driver to and from the airport. On one such trip, he said to me, “Danny, I have a story you’re not going to be believe,” and he shared with me the story—a story he had just heard from a family member of his—of Dvir Emanuelof and Dvir’s mother, Dalia. We hear the story today from Dalia’s sister, Kalanit Turgeman.

Dalia and I ended up being in touch again, a decade and a half after we first met, around a project that she’s involved with, the construction of a synagogue and beit midrash in memory of her husband, Netanel, and her son, Dvir, who was the first Israeli solder killed in Operation Cast Lead, in January 2009. (More information about the project and opportunities to support are below.)

Being in touch with her convinced me that the story of the miracle was worth telling again, so Dalia asked her sister, Kalanit (who is an English teacher) to come on the podcast. In the conversation that follows, Kalanit tells the story of her nephew Dvir, the tragedy of his falling, and the miracle of sorts that followed.

We’re marking Hanukkah this year with four podcast conversations, each related to one dimension of what the holiday is about. Here is the tentative schedule:

Today: Kalanit Turgeman is the sister of Dalia Emanuelof. Dalia’s son, Dvir, was the first Israeli solder killed in Operation Cast Lead, in January 2009. Kalanit tells the story of her nephew Dvir, the tragedy of his falling, and a miracle of sorts that followed.

Wednesday: Israel is a land of modern day Maccabees. Our younger generation showed that they are made of the very best that the Jewish people has ever produced. My colleague at Shalem College, Dr. Ido Hevroni, shares how teaching war-saturated classics like the Iliad and the Odyssey to young people who have just returned from battle is different from teaching it to anyone else. Only in Israel can these conversations unfold.

Friday: We are used to thinking about Hanukkah as being about a battle for the religious freedoms that foreign powers had sought to steal from us. But what about when we have to battle our own leaders for religious freedom? Rabbi Shaul Farber, founder and CEO of Itim, speaks about the surge of interest in Jewish expression in post-October-7 Israel, and the irony that it risks being snuffed out by our own religious authorities.

Sunday: Jews have fought bravely not only in Israel’s wars, but in armies across the world. Far too often, Jewish soldiers were buried with nothing to indicate that they were Jews. Shalom Lamm, who heads Operation Benjamin, speaks about the sacred search for those graves and the delicate work with local governments to honor these men as Jews. Contrary to what we might expect, there are such graves in Israel, too. Lamm explains how that could possibly be.

The synagogue project

Our conversation with Kalanit about the miracle of the two Dvir’s doesn’t go into much detail about the project over which Dalia and I reconnected. For those interested, here’s a bit more information; readers who might wish to assist with the project can do so here.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s podcast conversation.

For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

It’s useful here to recall 1973 and 1974 — the era after the disastrous Yom Kippur War. Though Golda Meir was at the helm when the calamity unfolded, she was re-elected after the war. It was only after the Agranat Commission (the sort of commission that Benjamin Netanyahu is refusing to appoint) lay the blame squarely at the feet of the IDF leadership—and largely “acquitted” the political echelons—that all hell broke loose, and Golda was soon forced to resign.

Golda Meir was replaced by Yitzchak Rabin, thus continuing the long line of Labor leaders who had run the country since its founding in 1948. And then Rabin won re-election. One might have wondered, back then, “is change never going to come?”

Yet it did. In 1977, Menachem Begin became the first person to unseat Labor after the founding party’s 29 year run, and in many ways, with only brief interruptions, that Likud “run” has continued since then. If 1973 is any indication, change comes not in the first elections or perhaps even in the next, but when the voices and visions that offer something different have ripened.

What are the new, emerging visions for Israel? Who are the people behind them?

Today’s guest, Reuven Taub, is one of the key players. Israel’s malaise is not just about politics, Taub argues in our conversation today—it’s about our essential understanding of who we are and what we’re doing in this region. The Ehud Barak notion that we are the “villa in the jungle”—outsiders who must protect ourselves at all costs against the jungle that surrounds us—is an idea that has expired and that now causes damage.

It’s time to rethink everything, argues Taub. Our geopolitical posture, Israel’s socio-political vision and the Jewish state’s national story—all to energize a new period in our history.

The grandchildren’s generation is intent on re-founding Israel, and today, we hear part of that vision.

To read Reuven Taub’s recent Times of Israel blog post, “Intelligence may not be the only 1973 failure we are repeating,” click here:

For more information about Alenu (and its Hebrew website), click here. To support the work of “Alenu”, you can click here.

We’re experimenting with a new format that we hope may be simpler for many of our listeners, sending the same post to paid and non-paid subscribers alike. Nothing about content or access has changed; what is different is simply the format of the posts.

Several readers have written to say that they were unable to access the Neriah Kraus or Alex Sinclair full episodes on their preferred podcast apps as a result of this change. We’re revising the system slightly to address that, and in addition, we’ll be re-sending those episodes to paid subscribers later this week to fix the problem the encountered. We’re sorry for our goof.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Reuven Taub lives in Jerusalem and is a father of three. He is reservist combatant in the Sayeret Matkal special forces unit, and a graduate of the Hesder Yeshiva in Kiryat Shmona. After completing his regular service in the IDF, he joined the civilian sector, and while studying for a degree in Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics (PPE) at the Hebrew University, he was a founding partner in establishing “The Crucible for Leadership”. In addition, he was responsible for developing and managing the Gideonim Program for heads of leadership institutions in Israel. Over the past half decade, Reuven has served as VP of Operations at StatRap.

For our paid subscribers

The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of the Reuven Taub conversation. For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.

One of the questions that people ask me more than anything else after they hear a podcast or they read a column or they just talk about Israel is, who’s going to make change? Are we going to keep recycling the same people? Is this going to be another election where it’s the same people running in the same issues come up? And if we’re really going to make dramatic change, where is it going to come from? And we have interviewed over the course of time a number of people who are very committed to making change. We’ve interviewed the leaders of Ha’Rivon Ha’Revi’i, the fourth quarter, Yosmat Ha Me’a, the 100 initiative or the initiative of the century. We interviewed, not that long ago, two people from a new political party called El Hadegal. One of them was David Sherez, David Sherez, we interviewed another person. We have interviewed Einat Wilf, who actually just founded a political party called OZ, and we’ll be speaking with her again in another few weeks. We’re here to have a conversation this morning with someone who is part of a young group of people, a group of young people who are taking things in a very dramatic direction and in a very different a way, not founding a political party, but maybe even founding a country, talking about the founding ideas of a country.We’ll explain why in a second. My guest this morning is Reuven Taub. You’ll learn more about him in just a second. We’re going to hear a little bit about his own personal background. He’ll say something about his own experiences on October 7th. Then we’re going to get to the organization of which he is a central part, one of the founders called Alenu, which many people might recognize as the name of a prayer from the liturgy, but it really means it’s on us. And this group calls itself the founding grandchildren. So if their grandparents were the generations of the founders of the country, there’s a group of young people, 18-35, something like that, who have said, now we’re going to, quote, unquote, re-found the country. And we’re in for a fascinating conversation. So, Reuven, first of all, you’re a very busy guy these days. So thank you very much for taking the time to be with us.Thank you, it’s a pleasure, thanks for inviting me.First of all, tell us about you.I grew up not far from here. We’re in Bacca. I grew up to parents who both made Aliyah from London. I actually live not far from here today towards Katamonim, I’m 30 years old. I live there with my wife, Ayelet, who made Aliyah herself from LA and our three little children. Briefly about me, I spent two years after high school in a yeshiva, yeshivat Hesder in Kiryat Shmona, by the Lebanese border where you study Talmud and biblical studies and volunteering in the community. Afterwards, I actually didn’t do the Hesder program where you draft with your group of soldiers to somewhere that this army assigns you. I wanted to try out for the best I could do, and I got into a unit called Sayeret Matkal.Which is basically, the most elite commando unit in the army.Yeah, no, it’s a well-known unit. It has very famous operations. I served there as a combat operator and a sniper. I was in mandatory service, and I stayed on for an extra period. I actually had a tough decision to “Do I stay in the system for a career or do I leave?” Probably the hardest decision I had to make until today to leave what we call the golden cage because it’s an incredible job to be an officer in the unit, and you’re given a lot of responsibility at a young age. After four years there, I left. I went into the social scene. I was a co founder of an organization called “Gidonim”. I joined people from the informal education area. The Mechinot, the Leadership academies, the gap years in Israel, where people go and study and learn how to become leaders, civil leaders. This organization, the goal was to bring together all the heads of these different institutions all around the country and bring them together to learn, empower one another, and to help them build their organizations together. I led this organization for a couple of years while studying in Hebrew U. For me, it was an incredible experience to meet these people who are building the next generation of leaders. The slogan was “leading leaders”. We lead people who lead people, but they are and also the leaders themselves.

After a few years there, which was an incredible experience to found an organization, I’m like, “Okay, this is great. How do we scale?” When you want to scale, you think about technology. I found myself meeting a lot of people in the tech space. When I’m talking about social issues and social problems, which is something that drives me, I met a number of people. One of them was someone who today is my co founder at “Alenu”, who is called Yonatan Nadiri, and I joined him in a company called “Healthy IL”. It’s a tech startup, a medical device startup, which is the first and only company ever to receive an FDA approval for an AI diagnosis test performed on your smartphone. So the goal was to enable people, specifically in the kidney space, to detect early signs of CKD, chronic kidney disease, or to detect signs of need for dialysis, basically, using your smartphone. And we managed to do this. It took a long time. I was there for over five years. I served as the VP.Is your smartphone hooked up to something or just your smartphone?No, you get a kit. You get a cardboard box sent to your house. In it, there’s a cup. There’s an app which directs you how to place a sample in the cup. You then take a dipstick, which is in the kit. You dip it in the sample. You take a picture with your phone, and just that picture is equivalent to a lab test. FDA approved, it was an incredible experience, a very difficult experience. It took a long time because based on our FDA approval, many other companies were able to enter that track. Because being the first, being a pioneer at something. There’s a lot of hurdles along the way, but other people could leverage the fact that we did it. And today, other people are on that track as well. The biggest claim to fame for me is that today, close to 2 million people worldwide have tested using our technology. And close to 100,000 people, we’ve managed to avert dialysis for them. Because these are people, if you detect early signs of chronic kidney disease, then you can intervene and you don’t need to deteriorate. People don’t deteriorate to dialysis.So working in Israel, working in the UK, a lot in England with the NHS and working in the States with the big healthcare providers. For me, that was an incredible experience also to build a global company, supply chain from China to Kiriyat Gat through the UK, Mexico, and the US, obviously. But also the fact that I had this dashboard where every day you could see how many people tested and how many people found positive signs in their urine sample was a very, I’d say, meaningful and fulfilling experience. The fact that you can influence, you have an impact on such a large scale. I was there through the year of the judicial reform, we could talk about that.

But on the seventh of October, things changed, obviously for everyone, myself included. I serve in the unit sniper team till today in the reserve sniper team. I was called up at 7:50 in the morning, 7:52 to be exact. We were actually by my wife’s parents in Modi’in. We were there because in retrospective, I expect that’s a funny story, we had tickets for a Bruno Mars concert that Motzei Chag in Tel Aviv. So we said we’d leave the kids there. We’d leave the kids with my in-laws and we’ll go to the concert. I was with the kids early in the morning. We start hearing explosions, the Iron Dome, and I turned on my phone and I see that eight minutes ago, I was called up. I wake up my wife, I tell her I’m going down south, no idea where I’m going. On the way down, I turn on the radio to hear what is it that I’m going towards. Because of the Tzeva Adom, the sirens on the radio, I have no idea. Very quickly in my unit, I stopped by my unit. Probably took me 120 seconds, I already had my gear, my sniper rifle, and I’m already on the Jeep on the way out. I won’t go into all the stories of that day.

By 10:30 AM, I was already in the field deployed. We were ambushed. The first battle we had, my vehicle, 12 guys, was at Tzomet Ma’on. It’s the junction that basically splits the Otef, the Gaza envelope area from north to south, towards Ofakim. There was a ambush by 12 Nuhba terrorists, shot an RPG at our vehicle in a lot of fire. It was in that battle that my commander on the day, and this is where I think you know him as well, Amir Meir Skouri. He died in my arms while I was treating him. He was a student at Shalem at the time. I could talk about him for a while, but also a very heroic during battle. That was the first battle of the day. It was that battle where, finally, after a while, we managed to kill the terrorists there and continue to other places, to Reim, through the Nova, surrounding Beeri, lots of the different creeks.

For me, that experience beyond being an absolute nightmare, thinking, “When am I waking up from this day?” Probably my biggest takeaway from that day, looking back, is what lack of sovereignty looks like or what it feels like. I remember actually listening on your podcast a few weeks ago, you spoke about the “The Ark of history”, the Ark of history doesn’t necessarily bend towards how Zionism thinks it does. And listening to that, I have a very personal example or feeling towards that. On October 7th, it’s not a terror attack, it’s an invasion. And when you see an invasion like that and you experience it, you can imagine not having a sovereign Jewish state. That’s what it looks like. The fact that me, I was born in Israel, grew up in Israel, never imagined the fact that Jewish sovereignty doesn’t exist. Now it’s a very clear, vivid image. That’s probably the biggest and deepest takeaway from that day. Then spent many, many days, triple digits in Miluim since. The first few months for me, and people, if there’s an American crowd listening, they may connect. I had a very, I call a Forest Gump experience, an Israeli Forrest Gump experience, because Forrest Gump obviously was at every meaningful junction in American history. For me, just being in my unit and being where I was, I happened to be at all the places or the events that caught the national discourse or the media discourse. So whether it’s, I won’t go into too many details, but whether it’s things to do with hostages or the tunnels or Shifa, everything like that, you come out, you turn on your phone and you see that everyone’s talking about the event that you were there with your twelve other guys. It’s a very weird feeling because everyone’s talking about where I was. What do you know about my experience?But you realize that everyone’s so emotionally moved by it and you see that public consciousness may be very, very far from reality. It’s a very sobering experience. I think the biggest takeaway, not from October 7th, but I’d say from the first six months of war, is the name of our organization. It’s “Alenu”, it’s on us because coming out from that experience, I look right and left and up and down. To people who I really look up to, whether it’s in media, politics, tech, and so on, and you see that in Israel, in Hebrew, there’s a phrase “the responsible adult”, you see there isn’t. You see there is an adult, but you don’t see necessarily the responsible one. That feeling of it could push you into two directions, into stress and into, “Okay, let’s hide”, or it could motivate you to do something. And thankfully for me, it was the latter. And this organization called It’s “On Us” was born from, I think, that experience and many others. So I think that just takes us to the birth of “Alenu”, I’ll say one more point. I think in terms of, and you opened with this, which people will change the future of Israel?I believe it’s very much in terms of the people, but it’s not only the people, it’s also the ideas. I’m a true believer of ideas and that ideas can change reality. You obviously need the combination of people and ideas, but very good people without an idea is not enough. When we started “Elenu”, Yonatan and I, we started with the idea, the idea that we are now living through our third founding moment. At founding moments, you don’t lean back and you don’t try and tweak things and fix along the edges. You re-found, like you mentioned, you re-found, you go to the core and you build on the shoulders of your founding fathers and mothers. In Israel, it’s 1947, ‘48. The founding parents, so you have the founding children who are the 1985. We can go into depth and speak about why 1985. We are now living in the era. We are on their shoulders, but we’re living in the era of the founding grandchildren. For me, it’s a very energizing period. People who say it’s 1948. It feels like 1948 again, bring it on. Let’s do it. I’m extremely energized in that sense and very optimistic.I want to hear more about the optimism in a second. I want to hear a lot more about the optimism. But I said, anyone listening who’s been around the block a few times knows that for many years, the classic work on Zionism was Arthur Hertzberg’s “The Zionist idea”. Then, of course, Gil Troy, who also lives in this neighborhood, revised it and did an updated version called “The Zionist Ideas”. But when you say that this is about an idea, that’s a deeply Zionist historical take. In other words, Zionism was, I mean, America’s Revolution also was about an idea also. Jefferson, Hamilton, and so on and so forth. But there are certain revolutions which are fundamentally about ideas, and I think none of them more so than Zionism. So this is about the idea. So you have this experience. You grew up in a world deeply committed to Israel, a deeply Zionist family and community and neighborhood and so on and so forth. You went to very Zionist educational institutions. You did this incredible work in the tech sphere and in the health sphere and so forth. And then, of course, October 7th and what that does.Give us a bit of a diagnosis. You say “there’s no responsible adult here”. And again, we’re going to stay away from the political personalities right now because we really want to talk about ideas here. What’s broken? Before we get to how you’re going to fix it, we know all a lot of things that went wrong. We know a lot of things that went on October 7th, and we know that the political system is this, and there’s been no National Commission of Inquiry, etc. None of those things are unimportant. I don’t mean to be dismissive in my tone, but you have a bigger idea of what’s wrong. So what’s wrong?Societies, in Hebrew “chavarot”, societies and companies, actually- it’s the same word in Hebrew. It happens across the board. So what’s essentially broken at the core is something that happens to everyone. And there’s something a little bit comforting to know that it happens around the world. It’s not only in Israel, it’s a global issue, and it happens to companies as well. At the core stands the idea that political paradigms, political ideas, have an expiration date. So when you found a company, it’s easier to talk about companies, it’s less so when you found a company and you think about who we are and what our vision is and where we want to go, and it fits this strong fitness function with reality. The first few years, the first period usually works and everything fits really nicely and you feel like, “Okay, we’re going in a great direction”. But slowly, slowly, reality shifts and you’re still stuck with the same bureaucracy, with the same idea, the founding idea you set off with. And along the course of time, you realize where reality hits a wall or you hit a wall because reality has changed so much that you understand that the idea that I set out with isn’t fitted to reality anymore and you need to reinvent or re-found the fundamental idea.Now, what happens before you re-found the idea, when reality has shift so far, you start seeing all these different symptoms, and you try to explain to yourselves why things you see in reality, they actually fit your your existing idea of reality. We know this from Daniel Kahneman, we know this from lots of people who say the confirmation bias. So we walk around and say, “Well, actually, Hamas is deterred, but we only need to do so and so”. And then the education, “well, actually, we only need to fund a little bit more in education”. And we could go across the Israeli experience and say, well, things we’re seeing actually suit our older version of the political idea of who we are, where we want to go, what our story, but fundamentally, the core idea has expired. We’ve had this at the founding of the nation. Ben Gurion did this to himself. Between 30th of November, until the War of Independence, Ben Gurion said: “What led us to this success, what led us to here, is no longer what will take us forward. If we think in terms of our geopolitical posture of Great Britain as being the only the sole person or organization that we work against, that is not the future.” The future, he calls it “the game of nations”. We need Moscow and Washington to vote yes for Israel. That is where we’re going. If we want on our socioeconomic contract in Israel, if socialism was our promise to citizens up until now, that’s not what’s going to lead us forward. What’s going to lead us forward is going to provide people this, we call it Israel as an MVP, whatever works. Take money from Germany, let’s do it. It’s a different mindset. Then fast forward another 30 years, we’re in 1985, the idea again needs a refounding. It’s a unity government, interestingly enough. You have Shamir and Peres and say, “Okay, geopolitical posture to try and balance between the West and Russia doesn’t work anymore. We’re going all in on the West. Our socioeconomic contract, that’s it, it’s done. We’re doing mass privatization. We’re going all in on the OECD, we’re adopting the metrics and so on.”

Now, 30, 40 years later, we’re living on the previous paradigm. When When we look at reality and everyone feels that something’s not working, it’s this, we all have our explanation. It’s the Haredim, it’s the judicial reform, it’s the deep state. Everyone has their own, I’m not dismissing them as unimportant issues. Obviously, Bibi is at the core of all of these. Also, Bibi, who in itself is another symptom, is something where beneath the surface, there’s something much deeper, and that’s our ability to say, “Okay, Our political idea has expired.”, Political idea is always composed of three questions. When you read about Thatcher, Reagan, Deng, Modi, it’s all the same questions. First is geopolitical posture. “What is your geopolitical posture in the next era, the next 30 years?”, “What is your socioeconomic contract, the covenant between the citizen and the state?” And the last one is, “what is your big story or a national narrative that pushes you forward?” When you give an updated answer that is suited for reality and suited for you, for who you are, then you can move to your next phase, to what we call Israel’s third Republic.So go over those three and tell us what the prevailing conception about those three is and why it’s broken. In other words, what’s wrong with our conception of the social contract? What’s wrong with our narrative? Just quickly to give us a sense of how you assess where is real as a country now thinks of itself, how it thinks of itself, and why it’s no longer suited to reality.I’ll do it quite briefly, and we can dive into to each one of them. Our geopolitical posture for the past 30 years has been, we are a villa in the jungle. It was coined by Ehud Barak almost 30 years ago, but at its core, it means we don’t belong here. We are a villa in this barbaric jungle, we have to lift up our walls, we don’t belong here. We’re the Europeans who play in the Champions League and the Eurovision, but we don’t belong to this region. The implications or ramifications of that are very deep. October 7th is an example. The agreement that may or may be on the Syrian front now, where we agree a line on the border, is another example. It means that, you know what? We’re not part of this region. We don’t belong. And as long as we dig our heads in the sand and speak to the West and to the US, then everything It would be okay. And that idea, I think it died on October 7th, but it was dead long before.

And what we suggest is replacing that idea with what I call from the Hebrew “from India all the way through to Africa”, from the Book of Esther. And it means at its core that after 2000 years, we’re home and we belong here. We’re indigenous. We have a role to play. We have a positive role to play in the region. Because when you ask MBS or MBZ, and I’ve spoken to people who’ve met them, and you ask them, who are they in the region in 2030, 2040, 2050? They have a positive vision for who they are in the region. When you ask the Israeli cabinet or the Israeli cockpit today, they’ll say, “Well, they don’t have a nuclear weapon. Those people don’t have an arsenal of missiles that can hit us. And we have some flailing peace agreement with them”. That is not a positive vision. That is not our responsibility. I’ll give you one or two short examples.

The fact that two countries on our borders, the governments collapse because of shortage of water. We have a terrible water crisis now in Egypt. And there’s one country in the middle, Israel, who solved that problem. Do we see that as, okay, it’s their issue, they need to deal with it, or do we see it as our responsibility as neighbors to see how we can help?Actually, on a geopolitical front, how do we leverage that for our benefit? That is a big mindset shift.

Another example from a total different aspect, the fact that I finished 12 years of school in Israel without speaking a word of Arabic is the strongest evidence of the fact that we don’t feel like we belong here. When even 20% of our population region speaks Arabic, but all our regions speak, it’s like telling someone in Canada, don’t speak English, just speak French or vice versa in Europe and so on and so forth. I think that’s the first point.

Moving on the socioeconomic contract in Israel. We’re used to the fact that there’s, unfortunately, 36, 37 ministers. The dynamic within Israel is, should we privatize? Should it all be publicly funded? The next era in Israeli socioeconomic contract should revolve around five public goods. Five public goods that government needs to provide to the citizen. It’s personal safety and security, it’s health care, it’s education, it’s transportation and infrastructure. Why these five? It’s the classic five, because when given these five, any citizen can realize their future the way they see fit. I’m agnostic to who that citizen is, of course.The idea is that what is the metric? What am I demanding from my government? What is the utmost goal? Give me these five public goods like you give me health care in Israel. How do you give me health care? I call it the obvious test. Fundamentally, every Israeli citizen, almost zero percent of the Israeli citizens, think about health care. They wake up in the morning and health care is not an issue. They move jobs, I’ve hired people in the US, where the first or second question in the interview is, what’s the health care benefits? In Israel, nobody thinks about it. People move city, move jobs. They think about all their life decisions, and health care isn’t an issue. Also on a price performance perspective, 70% of Israelis basically don’t pay for health care. In terms of the benchmark, it’s 8.5% of GDP. It’s relatively low compared to other countries, obviously compared to the US. You ask yourself, how is that? How did we manage to make health care such an incredible inferior public good?

When you look at it in the history, you say, well, we’re all in debt to one person in specific, a guy called Haim Ramon. He was the healthcare minister from ‘92 to ‘95, and he did what we call today in our organization, he went whale hunting. He saw that there’s an issue in Israeli health care that for a decade, from the 1980s to the 1990s, the whole system was corrupt. It was broken. The system didn’t work. People, and Unfortunately, it’s not nice to say this, but they were not provided health care based on their political party. You’re going back to if you had a red pamphlet, then you were part of one healthcare union, and if you didn’t have it, then you were part of another one.Just to remind people that the individual parties back at the founding of the state all created their own healthcare system. That’s where it came from.Then you have in 1989, you have Netanyahu, Shoshana Netanyahu, who’s a Bibi’s aunt, who’s a Justice on the Supreme Court. She’s the head of a committee to decide what do we do with Israel’s health care. They build this plan. It’s a very great plan. Committees, nothing happens, obviously. A few of these later comes this guy called Haim Ramon. In his campaign, during his election campaign, he tells the public, I am going to dismantle the health care system and put it back together. It’s not going to be easy. I’m going to do it because that’s the only way to build a health care system that will provide for everyone and so on and so forth. And then he actually does it, and he pays political prices. He was fired as the healthcare minister. So he came to the big conference of his party, of the ‘Avoda’.

He stands up and he gives this speech, the Whale speech. He says: “You guys Insist on taking money from people and not providing them health care and so on and so forth. And I try with my meager strength to push you back, but you don’t...” And people in that convention, people are shouting to him “Resign! Resign!”, and he resigns. And Rabin, who’s the Prime Minister at the time, tells him, Why are you doing this? We have Oslo, the peace on our head. Why are you doing this? Let me do the piece. And he says, No, I’m never going to forgive myself if I don’t do this because this is the time to do it.

He then resigns or he gets fired. He becomes the head of the Histadrut, of the Union. And back then, you could be a Knesset member and head of the Union, and he totally dismantles the Union healthcare system from within, and he then puts forward what we call today “The Mandatory Healthcare Law” that provided the system that we’re living through today. So the fact that Israelis wake up this morning and don’t think about health care is thanks to someone who is willing to fight that fight 30 years ago. And what we’re saying is the other four public goods have whales. There’s an education whale, there’s a personal security whale, and so on, that you need leadership with the political capital and the political will to go and hunt those whales in order to provide for all Israeli citizens. But without doing that, you’re never going to get to the same level of the healthcare system in Israel.Those are the five, and that’s what you need to provide for the citizens. There’s an interesting dynamic of how you do that and what it does to the Israeli social fabric. We can go in what that means for the Haredim, what that means for the Arab community and so on, we can go into that. Moving forward to the last issue. What is the national story? That’s the big question. What is your story which is suitable for the time, the period that you’re living in? So this area that I grew up in, there’s another writer who wrote the book “Startup Nation”, and that may have been the story we told ourselves “We are the Startup Nation” and myself included, and lots of others have benefited from that story. We bring the tech, the innovation to the world. But that story as well, that narrative has reached a wall, has reached the end of its purpose.Why?Because I believe that, first of all, other people are the startup as well, and that’s That’s not enough. That’s not enough to take us forward.So it may not be false, it’s just not sufficient.It’s great. We’re still a high tech hub. We’re still having exits here, Whizz and so on. That needs to continue. But that is not the national narrative that takes the nation to its next era. Because it worked really well at its time, but now we need a new story. And the new story, I call it in Hebrew, Ribunut Ivrit Ge’a, so “proud Hebrew sovereignty”. And it’s based on moral issues of of Abraham, the Ivri. We read a few weeks ago of Abraham Ivri, and he was the first person to be called Ivri. Ivri in Hebrew means ‘meever’, from the other side.The whole world’s on one side of the river and he’s on the other side.The whole world is on one side and he is on the other. When we are now thinking of Israel at our 100th anniversary. And that’s soon enough. We’re almost 80 years old. We need to have enough courage to say we’re adults, we have our own flavor, and it’s okay that we’re different. And the internal strifes that we’ve been having over the past few years, a lot of them have been because we’re trying to be like the Nordic system or like the American system or the liberal democracy that there is in other places, that is exactly what we need to mirror in Israel. And if we can’t say “You know what, everybody? It’s okay, we’re slightly different. We have our own set of rules”. And like there is a variant of democracy in Spain, and like there is a variant of democracy in Denmark, all liberal democracies, we will be able to create our own. And if we can’t say that on a public level and agree, it’s okay that our region is different, our history is different, our DNA is different, then moving forward as a nation is going to be very, very difficult. So every discussion we want to enter, whether it’s, do we do what’s called a narrow constitution or what the laws are for the number of members of parliament, those are all important issues.But the way we need to enter that discussion is from this mindset of what I call Hebrew sovereignty is that we are different and it’s okay. And that for me, when you put those three ideas together from who we are on a geopolitical level. So from India, starting with India as the key player in our geopolitical posture, we think about our socioeconomic contract and we think about who we want to be. Those together, for me, are the new idea of Israel in its third founding moment.Talk about India for a minute, because I think a lot of people probably just wrinkled their brow. And India as the central player, from the perspective of the typical listener “Who is this guy, Modi? Anyway, we don’t love when Bibi cozy up to Modi. We don’t love when Trump cozy up to Modi”. We hear all sorts of things about Modi subverting the democratic process in India. But you see India as a key player in a variety of ways. And you see Modi as a model, actually, in certain ways, not in every way, obviously, but in certain ways, is something that we should look at with tremendous admiration, almost. So say something about the role of India and maybe even the biometrics that he’s been doing and so on and so forth.So I’ll start, I think, with the bigger picture, and then we can go into Modi as well. When you look at the next 25, 30 years or even 50 to 100 years of where the world is going, there’s the US-China rivalry, and everything else is a derivative of that. The US foreign policy, everything is derivative of what happens with China. There’s the two camps which are now being built and so on. Then there is one country, the largest country in the world, the largest democracy in the world, who says, I’m not in any camp, I am my own. So in a bipolar world, I am the third Pole, and they mean it. Modi is the single leader in the world who is able to go to Trump and be buddies with Trump and then fly to Xi. Then the next They buy oil at a very cheap price from Putin. So he plays across the entire board.

And when you look at Israel’s geopolitical history and the strategy we’ve had over many, many years, we’ve always had a global superpower as an ally, and then we’ve always had a regional superpower as an ally. So Great Britain and Iran. And then we had actually Turkey as a local superpower, now they’re becoming one of our biggest adversaries. And then we’ve obviously shifted to the US as the global superpower. And looking forward, there is no replacing, obviously, the US as Israel’s closest ally and global superpower. But when you’re looking in the region, you realize that India, again, a billion and a half people growing at an annual rate of roughly over 7% GDP annually, you see that they are people who are willing to play in everyone’s court, and the ability for Israel to leverage that for our geopolitical posture is huge.

I think from a global perspective, that’s the first. The second is when you look at India’s challenges, there’s a lot of similarities to Israeli challenges, again, on different scale. But they have roughly 20% of their population is a minority Muslim population. For them, it’s 200, 300 million people, but it’s similar to ours when it’s a national government, so it’s very similar to Israel. They have a neighboring state, a radical Islam neighboring state with nuclear capabilities. They know what it’s like to live under that threat. Lastly, there’s a famous saying of why is America the biggest superpower? There’s four words, Ocean, Ocean, Mexico, Canada. In their region, everything is relatively calm. India, if something happens in our region, there’s pain for India, pain for Israel, pain for India.

Whether it’s the Straits of Hormuz or Straits of Tehran, all these issues. For one example, when there was the flare up between Pakistan and India, Iran sent forces to the border. So the entire region is moving very differently. We could speak about Turkey as the growing hegemon in the region and the relations between Turkey and Pakistan and what that means to India as well. So there’s a lot of moving pieces on the geopolitical front. I think on a deeper level, we have a connection with India because we know what it’s like to have tradition and technology.And to break away from the British in 1948.Exactly. Yeah, to break away from the British in 1948. I don’t know if I can say this, but we all hate the British. But no, totally. So the sense of taking responsibility for your future.

I was in India. I was invited to go to India, this is six weeks ago, on a delegation together with the finance minister and the chief economist of Israel. There was signing of a very big agreement. The first time India signed an agreement with an OECD country, it’s a Trade Protection Agreement, Investment Protection Agreement. And on the back of that, a whole bunch of business people and organizations were invited to come to be part of the discussions. I was blown away by two things. One, the optimism, the optimism of this is our time, very similar to the sentiment that I’m presenting here. But on a deeper level is everywhere you go, you hear the number 2047. 2047, that’s 100 years to India’s independence. Then you ask, what’s happening in 2047? From the biggest business people to, I’d say, the students across the board, people say 2047 is the year where India is no longer going to be a developing country.We are going to be a developed country. What does that mean? It means 13,000 GDP per capita. Right now, they’re about 2,500 GDP per capita. So they have a long way to go.

I asked them “do you believe it’s possible?” I was speaking to the chief economist, one of the people in Modi’s economic cabinet, he says “Yes” and I say “Why?” He says “Well, we have just under 25 years to get there. And if you look at our growth rate, we need to grow at 7. 6% annually. And in the last 25 years, we’ve been growing at 7. 3% But because of COVID, you take out COVID, it’s actually been 7. 9. So the answer is yes.” So “okay, what do you need to do?” And this is where we look at Modi as an example, because what you need to do is sometimes not so pleasant to hear. What you need to do is you need to be willing to whale hunt. I think we can use Modi as an example as an A-class whale hunter.

So what did Modi do just after he was elected? He said “We have just under a billion and a half people, but roughly, I’d say under 10% of them have identification ID. I cannot build an economy. I cannot build a modern country where no one has ID. There’s no bank accounts, there’s property rights and so on and so forth”. He says “what I’m going to do is I am going to do a very harsh reform to get biometric ID. How am I going to do it? And fight and combat the the the the black money, the money, the unidentified money and so on”. He says “Within six weeks, I am taking out of circulation the 501,000 Rupee notes. Anybody who wants to cash in on those notes needs to come to the bank near them. They cash in, they put their finger, get a biometric ID, and that’s how they will get their money back.” He was slaughtered, Modi, by the Global Bank and the IMF and all the economists that said “You’re going to hurt India’s GDP, the grandmothers in India. This is what they’ve been doing for centuries, and there’s going to be blood on the streets.” And he said “Okay, fine. You know what?” And they were all right. It all happened. It was a big hit, India’s economy dipped, classically, towards the end of his term, just by the time of the elections, you could see the rise.Today, almost a billion and a half people in India have biometric identification, and India is becoming the global finance hub of the world. I was at the Indian Nasdaq, the stock exchange. Incredible, the number of transactions performed every day. It’s quite mind-blowing. So this ability to, I’d say, sell a positive vision to society and say this is where we want to go, but along the way, trust me, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be, we call in Hebrew.Going down for the sake of coming up.Going down for the sake of going up. You need to be a transformative leader in order to do that, to tell the public “Trust me, it’s going to be hard, but it’s worthwhile because together we’re going to get to the promised land. Together, we’re going to have a new future where everybody can benefit from it.”So give us the parallel in the Israeli education system. You gave us an example from Haim Ramon in the health system where he said he was going to break the system apart, put it back together, to the point that, we just had this in our family not that long ago, somebody goes to the emergency room and has to get all kinds of tests. You don’t take out a credit card. You don’t even think about the cost. You just go get treated. You don’t think about it.You come home, that’s it. You gave an example of Modi in India doing something that the grandmothers and there’s going to be blood on the streets and it’s going to hurt the economy. And he said, Fine, it’s going to be all of those things. But I’m going to get there. And as according to you, he’s gotten largely there. We know that Israel has invested a tremendous amount of money in its education system. And we know that the Jewish people, which has always prided itself on education, actually has a country which has a failing education system. I don’t think there’s any other way to put it. We’re just dropping further and further back, but it’s not because of a lack of investment. So you have a sense of whale hunting also when it comes to education. So what’s the whale? What’s the hunt? What would a proactive candidate for the Prime Minister have to say to the people here “Here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s what I’m not going to do about education” to take your model?So the vision, start with the positive. The vision to make Israel’s education system one of the top three in the world, like our healthcare system. And we can do that, we can. I truly believe we can, even though when you look at the results, it’s quite unimaginable. And the vision goes through decentralizing and giving a lot more power to empowering headmasters. I can tell this from my mom, who’s been a teacher for 30 years. In the past decade, she’s been a headmaster. So giving a lot more flexibility in how you hire and fire teachers. So the vision is It’s actually relatively simple. More so, there’s actually a broad consensus across the political spectrum. I’m talking about the policy institutes, the think tanks, in terms of what a future education system could look like. The whale in education is as follows. There is a lot of power concentrated in specific areas. In education, it’s the education Ministry and the teachers unions. Every year, as long as I can remember on the first of September, I’ll say the 31st of August, nobody knows is school going to start the following day or not, because there may or may not be a strike where the teachers union hasn’t had an agreement with the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education, And nobody knows.And the bottom line is that over the past decade, we have quadrupled our education budget. In the past decade, we’ve doubled it. People say teachers don’t get paid a lot. They don’t get paid high tech salaries, but it’s the average teacher’s salary is higher than the average salary in Israel, in general. So money is not the issue. We have tried basically almost every reform under the sun. I can name all the different reforms, the five points, math and adding more this. And now people want to do AI in education. There’s all different solutions. We’ve tried everything. And when you look at the results, nothing, actually, recently, we’ve dipped a little bit. And when you speak to Israeli politicians they say “Well, yeah, we can’t do anything because there’s going to be a strike and there’s going to be... What can we do?” Imagine an Israeli leader who comes to the Israeli public and says the following, and says “I promise you that on first of September, school won’t open. I will be the Prime Minister of the Strike. I’m going to initiate a strike. You need to trust me that during these few weeks or few months when your kids are at home, and it’s going to be difficult, I am going to take apart and then build back the best education system that we can build. Now, during that period, it’s going to be difficult. And like I funded people who are evacuated from the north and the south during the war, I’m going to raise my debt to GDP from 71.5% to 72% during that period and fund you. 2000 shekel for every kid. It’s an investment. It’s worthwhile. But at the end, so that going down to go at the end of that system, I am going to totally transformed the Israeli education space.” Now, that is something that you need political capital and political will. You need people who are willing go through that down and up in order to change. That is a fundamental change in the way we see the future of Israel. It’s not a fix, it’s not a tweak, it’s a going to the core and changing the status quo at the deepest level.I would be happy to listen to you for hours, but I want to ask you two broad questions, and we can wrap up. One of them is this, what’s the theory of change? You are a group of young people, about 10 people, I think, is your cadre of people. You are getting a lot of traction. A lot of young Israelis are going on your website, and they’re making what might sound like small financial contributions, but people are getting on board. There’s something about what you’re doing that is speaking to young people. There are events in Israel now where people are getting together. You’re getting some traction. People are actually moved by this. Say something about the theory of change. In other words, your 10 very, very talented, really thoughtful, able, young people who are getting a lot of traction. What moves us from that to a different kind of Israel? It’s clearly not in the results of the elections in October 26th. That’s clear. So what is the plan?So I’ll say briefly about us, the team, and then the theory of change and where this goes from here. Like you said, the team is a very small, nimble team. Top, top people from whether it’s policy, research, data to production and media. And it’s going to stay small, it’s nimble, it’s fast. The people who are joining, like you mentioned, the people are, how can I help? What can I do? How can I be a part? I think it happens because there’s a dynamic of energy. It’s not, let’s lean back, let’s hug it out. Let’s just agree. No, there’s a positive vision. This is where we want to go. It may be difficult along the way, but okay, like I said before, it’s 1948, bring it on. And It’s primarily young people, but funny enough or interestingly enough, there’s a lot of people from, I’d say, ages 50, 55 and up who have grandchildren. It’s called the founding grandchildren, and they see responsibility for their grandkids. And they don’t want their grandkids to leave Israel. They want them to have as good of a life as they did over the past 20 to 30 years. And they feel a little bit of guilt, but a lot of responsibility to say “How can I make it? If I need to now make tough decisions, I will do that for the sake of my grandkids.” So that’s in terms of the movement and who the people joining are. The theory of change is as follows. It goes back actually to the piece that you mentioned. When you called me, you mentioned the piece I wrote a few weeks ago in the Times of Israel, is that 1973 is similar, in a sense, to what we’re living through now. So obviously, the Yom Kippur War was the biggest trauma up until then. The parallel is obvious. And then we had elections very soon after. And in the election soon after, Golda Meir was voted in in a landslide, 51 mandates, that’s unimaginable today.After the colossal failure.After she was the person responsible for the failure. You could do the parallel, but today, when you look at the polls, Very similar. So the trend is very similar. The trend is very similar. You ask yourself, how can that be? How can the Israeli mentality not have shifted to think, how can we not change our perspective? And there’s lots of different answers. But one of them is that people want to, after a trauma, they want to go back to what they’re familiar with. And we can discuss why that is. But the interesting thing is that the three years that followed that government, the Golda Meir and then Rabin government, mainly, she had to resign because of actually her health. Until 1977, nothing happened. Nothing foundational change. There wasn’t any big change. You would have imagined, we’ll change the way Israel thinks about security and the socioeconomic contract. Nothing happens. It takes three full years for the national mindset, the consciousness to shift. And in 1977, we get probably the biggest event in the history of Israeli politics, the big transition, Begin comes to power.Ending 29 years of Labor rule.Exactly. Ending 29 years of Labor rule. I would argue, actually, that Menachem Begin doesn’t do the refounding things he needs to do. And then we get to ‘85 with our back against the wall. And then we do the big issues.His inheritor, Shamir, does it with Pares.Exactly. But it takes time for national consciousness to shift. So drawing the parallel to today. Ideally, the theory of changes that you and I will hear because of the work that we’re doing that’s gaining a lot of traction, also in the larger public, also within a lot of people who move the needle in terms of the national narrative, so it’s people in media and so on, and also with the decision makers themselves, the people who are right now on the ballot, or the ones who are going to be on the ballot in the near future, and slowly totally moving the overton window to what is possible and what we should be doing. So hopefully, we will start hearing people using this type of mentality of like, You know what? It’s time to do the big changes. Let’s go whale hunting. Now, I don’t want to kid myself that that’s going to happen because right now, the campaigns are telling them the opposite. They’re saying, You know what? You know the famous phrase of, 80% of Israelis agree on 80% of the issues. It could be right. I think even if it is right now, it’s the 20% time. Now is the time to do the 20%.

“Alenu” the founding grandchildren, is a 20% organization. If in the next election cycle, we have like the 1974 to 1977 dynamic, where it’s going to be more of the same, whether it’s the existing coalition, where it’s a different coalition with a slightly be, we could say, broader consensus. If what you’re seeking is broad consensus, and that’s everything you’re going after, then you’re not going to do the 20% changes. What happens during those years, Alenu, the founder grandchildren, becomes the movement that will transform Israel at the next, at the 1977 stage.The last thing I want to ask you about is optimism. You’re animated by optimism. Your whole organization is animated by optimism. There are people that are leaving. You guys are not leaving. You say you want your children to grow up here. You want your grandchildren to grow up here. One could without much difficulty, paint a very not rosy picture of what’s happening here. The political stalemate and the Haredi thing is not going anywhere. We have not destroyed Hamas completely, and Iran may or may not be completely destroyed. We might not have not destroyed all of its nuclear capacity and Hezbollah is coming back. You could go on and on and on. But you have a very, very different take on Israel. And I thank God. I would love for you to explain to our listeners the well-spring of the optimism that you and your colleagues have. You have a tremendous amount of optimism about Israel. Tell us why.Yeah. So I’ll actually start with one of the interesting things when we started, Yonatan and I, we took this idea and we did a very thorough research to see what does the Israeli public, where does it meet the Israeli public? And the poll service, a very famous pall servist came back to us. He said “Listen, I’ve never seen something like this in political polling, that this idea has over 80% what’s called favorability on the coalition or the Bibi side, and over 80% favorability on the other side”. He said “I just don’t get it”. Then he went back, I’ve got a research, I’ve got to look into this. He came back and he says “I’ve got It’s called Sober Optimism”. It says this idea of sober optimism is you’re not saying everything’s great, telling people we are now living the dream, total victory. That’s not the story. On the other hand, you’re not saying, oh, everything’s terrible, we’re the worst. We’re never going to get out of this. So just on that point, this idea of sober optimism leads us. That’s one of our key leading concepts. Why am I optimistic? We can attack single issues. So the Haredim and demographics, why I’m very, very cautious there and thinking we need to do deep, deep changes on that aspect.But I’m optimistic on a larger scale because you look at the Western world and there’s one of two challenges. Either there’s no babies, So more people were buried this year in Italy than were born, and you have it over Europe and the West in general. Or you have a different demographic challenge, like in Israel, where you’re having a lot of babies, and maybe let’s say babies who are not the right, and I’m saying this with quotes, the right type of babies. But when you’re a leader and you have to choose one of those two problems, which would you choose? I would very much prefer my problem, the one where, okay, how can I actually leverage this and change this and use this as a point of actually growth and power. But that’s on that issue. On a larger perspective, I think since King Solomon, has there been a sovereign Jewish leader sitting here in Jerusalem with the economic, military, social power that we have today. From economic perspective, you’re looking at all the big figures and the numbers, whether it’s a quarter ago that the head of the bank didn’t lower the interest rate because the shekel is too strong after two years of a war, where a debt to GDP ratio is still below the 75%.

That’s incredible. When you’re looking at the high tech sector and you’re looking at exits, obviously, like Whizz and others, a growing, booming When you look at energy, we have 25 years of energy at a given price. That’s unparalleled in Europe and so on. When you look at academia and the military, myself included, but others, obviously, many people, the fact what is the Israeli military is able to do and has showcased is second to none. The ability to have this when you’re so superior to anyone in the region, imagine this in 1948, where were we then and Where are we now? I think also on a social perspective, people feel like it’s, and it is, I’m not arguing with the sentiment that things are really tough. I’m not arguing with that sentiment. But which other country in the world would go through 10 months of demonstrations in the streets against changing the fabric of the democracy with 10% of the population in the street. Then October seventh, an full on invasion, two years of a war where during the war you have demonstrations against the government for the hostages, against all that going on. During that period, you have social movements, “Alenu” and people taking responsibility, and young people being involved. Where on Earth you have this type of such a strong democratic, civic movement, society. So all these things together, I am extremely optimistic. I’m not shying away from the challenges ahead because they’re big, and that’s why you need to whale hunt and you need to be willing. But if you don’t come of it from this sober perspective and say, not everything is bad. There’s a There’s amazing things to leverage. There’s big challenges ahead. You put those two together and you say, I don’t know if they use this on an American podcast, but the term, yes, we can, it’s a true battle cry. Founding Grandchildren looks back and says, We’ve had founding fathers, mothers. They did it. We’ve had the founding children, 85. They did it. Now it’s up to us.Yes, we can actually is an iconic way to end this, but I think it’s a perfect way to end it because I think even though, obviously, it’s an American phrase and it’s obviously, they say it’s a controversial because of the person that initiated it and all that. But it is. I mean, yes, we can. It’s a very Israeli notion these days. Frankly, it’s not so much an American notion these days. I think there’s a sense there of tremendous change. The sands are shifting. We’re not quite sure what to do. People are bewildered looking around. You have this sense here that there is, I love this idea that this 80% agree about 80% of the issues. Who cares? Let’s focus on the 20%, let’s go whale hunting, let’s break what needs to be broken so we can rebuild it, let’s rethink the central ideas. This has really been growing on all over again, as you say. This is really the work that he and his colleagues did. To hear a young generation of people who are so talented and so thoughtful and so deeply data-based and so on and so forth doing this work after having had the experiences that you and many others had on the seventh and thereafter, really, I think, is a source of tremendous optimism. Somebody here who’s got grandchildren who are not quite old enough to be part of that movement, but very soon will.When we did some of the swag, we got a nice hat and whatever. We took out a baby girl, a onesie. When it says on the back, it says in the front, it says like Elaina, the founding grandchildren, on the back, it says “Saba ze alai”, so “grandpa, it’s on me”. And you see, it’s sweet to see little kids are walking. So I’ll make sure to give you one.We have God willing, a grandchild on the way doing a couple of months. So that’ll be a perfect onesie for him. In any event, this is really very inspiring. It’s very moving, I think, at a time in which the world seems be shifting so dramatically, and people are not quite sure which way is north. It can become overwhelming. And a lot of people are talking. I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was saying that the central issue in her life is how do you raise children in an era when there’s no hope? That was exactly her question. She wants to write a book about that. But you’re saying that’s not true. It’s not an era with no hope. It’s an era with tremendous resources, tremendous reasons for hope. We just need a group of people to actually begin to ask the questions and to do the things that need to be made happen. So Alenu, a brand new organization, a website which right now is only in Hebrew, but is a very different website because it is filled with content. I mean, a lot of these websites are very thin. Yours is filled with content. I think that also says a tremendous amount. Reuven Taub, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your work with us. We wish you tremendous success.Thank you very much.

But as we hear to from Neria Kraus, the role is actually much more complex and nuanced than that. Israeli journalists, we learn from her in today’s conversation, were a central part of the effort to keep the hostage issue in the center of Presidents Biden and Trump’s attention. Why? Because, as we’ll hear, the Israeli government did not want a hostage deal that would bring an end to the war and was thus trying to shift Washington’s focus elsewhere.

It was up to Israeli journalists to keep White House official focused on saving the hostages.

It thus turns out that journalists do much more than report the news—sometimes, they shape it, too.

And Israeli journalists can also be the wakeup calls that Israelis need on a whole array of issues. For example, throughout the entire war, the State of Israel did not have a single official English-language spokesperson. Such a person might not have been able to prevent Israel’s becoming a pariah state, but we didn’t even try. Israelis learn that through correspondents.

And as for Netanyahu’s continuing claim that that he knows America better than anyone, and that he’s best suited to speak to the Americans because he has his finger on the American pulse? There, too, reality is a bit more complicated, and is changing rapidly.

We’re experimenting with a new format that we hope may be simpler for many of our listeners, sending the same post to paid and non-paid subscribers alike. Nothing about content or access has changed; what is different is simply the format of the posts.

An excerpt of our conversation with Neria Kraus:

Neria Kraus is an Israeli journalist who serves as the United States correspondent for Channel 13 News since 2023. That same year, she was selected by Forbes Israel as one of the 30 most promising young Israelis. She completed her military service at Galei Tzahal (Israel’s Army Radio). After her discharge, she joined the news desk of Yedioth Ahronoth as a reporters’ coordinator. In 2017, she joined Channel 10 as a reporter for the television program “Hakol Kalul” (”All Inclusive”), and from 2019 to 2023, she served as the culture editor for Channel 13 News.

The full conversation with Neria Kraus

along with a transcript for those who prefer to read is available, as always, to paid subscribers below.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Our complete conversation with Neria Kraus:

The link above will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

If you watch Israeli TV, and especially if you watch channel 13, then the face of our guest today is very, very well known to you. Neria Kraus is the White House correspondent for channel 13 Israel News. She is very well-regarded in Israel. She’s all over the place. She also has a podcast called The Kraus Report, which you can find after you hear her today on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. She covers US-Israel relations, the American Jewish Community, Israel and Gaza, and just a terrific journalist, hugely thoughtful and incredibly articulate. I’m actually very grateful to Neria for actually having me over to their home in New York. I happened to be in New York for a family matter, and I’ve been watching her forever, but we’ve been exchanging emails, and finally, I’m in your neighborhood, so can we do this? Neria, thank you very much for having me in your home.First of all, thank you so much for this introduction. We can stop here. Okay, that’s quite good.It was great to have you.We can have a cake from the Hungarian pastry shop if you’d like.All good. In any event, tell us, before we get to the issue which we want to talk about today, you’ve been in America as an official journalist and correspondent for channel 13 since the beginning of 2023, which means that you were here for the judicial reform or judicial overhaul, depending on who you ask and what their political view is. And then, of course, you’ve been here ever since October seventh, and so for the two plus years since the war. And what we’re going to talk about today is your experience as an Israeli journalist, how being an obviously, obviously Israeli journalist, and your microphone in the room has a big channel 13 on it and all that. How has it changed being an Israeli journalist in the United States since the beginning of 2023? But before we get to that, some of our listeners or a lot of our listeners who don’t listen Israeli TV might not know a lot about your background. So let’s just start with you, where you grew up, how you got into this whole line of work and all of that.So my name is Neria Kraus. I grew up in Israel. I was born in Tel Aviv, and we moved around the country. Mainly lived in Tel Aviv most of my life. I went to the army. I served in Galey Tzahal, which is the radio station, which is now about to maybe...Maybe get shut down.Get shut down by the government, we’ll see. But this is a very important radio station in Israel, one of the two biggest, most important broadcasting radio stations in Israel. I was there in the army. After that, I went to the Hebrew University for a short while, and then I moved to Tel Aviv University to a great program called the Lautman program. It’s an excellency program there where you can go basically to any course you’d like in Tel Aviv University. I did that while I was already on Israeli TV, we used to call it channel 10. Now it’s called channel 13. It’s one of the two biggest and most important channels in Israel. I moved to the US about three years ago, as you said. I remember before I moved to the US, I remember Yariv Levin, the Minister of Justice, doing that press conference where he announced the judicial overhaul.It was like January third or fourth or something like that.Yeah. It was a few days before I took my flight and came with many suitcases to New York. And that was an insane day because I think people realized that something huge is about to happen in Israel. I just moved to the US. And I remember when I started talking to the White House about that, it was interesting. It was nothing, they didn’t know of this thing that is called an Israeli Journalist that is based in the US, who’s trying to talk to them because It wasn’t really a thing back then when I just moved in here.Well, I just want to ask you, the channels didn’t have somebody in the White House press corps? They didn’t have people like you stationed in New York doing the work that you’re doing?Not for a while. And I think the work that I’m doing, which is having sources from within the White House and State Department and White House officials. And today, from time to time, I also speak to President Trump directly. They didn’t have that thing.Why?It was just a thing of Israeli TV that you have to have maybe people in New York covering more restaurants and fun stuff. When I moved here, I told my editor, I want to be in charge of US-Israel relations. I want to be in charge of talking about anti-Semitism. I think this is the subjects that Israelis don’t really hear about in a good way in in-depth conversations, in-depth reports. I think this is what they need to hear about. It was way before October 7th. Today, I think it goes without saying that this is what the Israeli audience needs to hear about more and more, because if they’re not aware of US-Israel relations, of the White House, of the anti-Semitism in the US, they can’t really predict what’s going to happen with Israel, with the war in Gaza. People were really surprised in Israel to hear about the backlash, the global backlash around the world regarding October 7th and the war in Gaza.So I think this is very important, and I believe people learn to understand that. And so it’s been incredible. And when I first got here, they were pretty surprised that Israeli journalists is trying to understand what they’re saying about the judicial offer. They did want to talk, so they started understanding that it’s good to be in touch with Israeli journalists. And of course, once this administration, Biden’s administration, left office and Trump’s administration started, everything changed again. They are even more, I think, communicative with Israeli journalists today.So you got here in January 2023. The judicial reform, judicial overhaul is just taking off. October 7th is many months away. What’s it like to be an Israeli? And just give us, if you can take us through the process of what was it like then? When did you first begin to feel that being an Israeli somehow was more complicated than it had been when you’ve gotten it? Maybe you can give some examples of how complicated it’s gotten. I think our listeners would be really interested to know. I mean, they all understand what’s going on with Israel in the world and so forth. A friend of mine just said that a friend of mine who’s actually worked in the Bush Whitehouse. I was talking to him today about something, and he’s not in politics at all anymore. But he said he actually thinks that the day is going to come, that Israel’s closest friends are going to be the countries immediately surrounding it, and the countries in Europe that used to be Israel’s friends are going to be the ones that we have more, it’s going to get completely flipped. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.But it’s changed a lot for you. I think our listeners would just be fascinated to hear, what was it like when you first got here? When did you begin to sense that it was changing? And what’s it like now?When I first got here, I was proud, and I’m still very proud to say that I’m an Israeli. I have no problem in saying that. I know some people, some Israelis, when they go abroad, as tourists, they’ll hide their Hebrew name on Uber apps or stuff like that. I’m not doing that. I’m an Israeli. I’m out there as an Israeli. I’m walking around. Even when I go to cover pro-Palestinian products, I go with my Hebrew microphone. It says Hadashot Shlosh Esre, News 13 in Hebrew. It’s clear that I’m an Israeli. I’m not hiding this. But I think a lot has changed in the way people react to that. Because when I got here, when I said that I was an Israeli, it was for people who are not from the Jewish community, who they’re not a part of everything that the Jewish community knows and feels. It was exotic for them, I think. It was cool. It was something different. They wanted to hear more about it. They wanted to know more about it. Today, when I say that I’m an Israeli, you know what? Let’s go to October 7th. Immediately after October 7th, when I said that I was IsraeliYou were here in America when it happened?Yeah, it was a Friday Eve here, 11:30, 11:29. I saw the push notifications. I was on a website in Israel called Walla. Walla always had notifications popping on your screen in red alert when there’s a red alert in Israel, when the alarms are going off, so it started and I was like, What’s going on? And I immediately told Ido, It seems like a war is going on in Israel. And I immediately called my news desk. It’s Shabbat morning in Israel, Saturday in the morning. I woke people up. They immediately went live. And I stayed up the entire night because I got so many videos that I saw that the news desks in Europe, in the US, they don’t understand what’s going on. They’re saying it’s another skirmish. Israel is attacked. They didn’t understand what was going on. So it was so important for me to try to do some sort of, It’s not Hasbara, but to put the facts out there that Israel is under attack and this is a war and there’s a massacre going on. And it’s insane. I was awake for a few days. I was not sleeping at all. I went live on radio stations in different radio stations and TV stations here in the US, in Europe, trying to explain what was going on, trying to say that this is a huge attack on Israel.And while I was doing that, of course, I have friends in the battlefield. I have my family in Israel. We lost a good friend of ours, my boyfriend’s Ido, best friend, who was during that morning, he was in Hertzelia at his home, and he heard the news, so he immediately told himself, I need to go help out. He sort of made himself a reserve for that day and started fighting in Kibbutz Beeri, and he saved a lot of families. Eventually, unfortunately, he fell during that fight on Kibbutz Beeri. And so we, it was unbelievable what happened on October 7th. But then on October 8th, we live pretty close to Columbia University, I had protests under my home saying, resistance is justified while terrorists are still in the Kibbutzim.It’s important to say that Israel has done nothing at that point.Nothing.Israel hasn’t started the ground invasion. It hasn’t even started bombing Gaza yet. And already you’re hearing protests under your window.I saw that with my own eyes because I went downstairs. I wanted to see what was going on. I mean, I was sure this is some protest that is trying to support us. It was pro-Palestinians walking around with signs, print and signs, saying, resistance is justified. Back on that very day, we didn’t know yet that Ido’s friend, that our friend, Sagi Golan, was murdered because we were trying to find information, but no one knew because we still had terrorists in the Kibbutzim. Israel didn’t do anything. Israel was not functioning on October 8th as well.People may not remember because it’s been two years, but I think the last live, quote unquote, terrorists were found and killed three days in, if I’m not mistaken.And on the 8th, I had people protesting under my home saying, resistance is justified, saying that everything that Israel should fall. And I was shocked. And this is not what I knew three days before that. And this is not America that I knew. This is not New York that I knew. This is not Columbia University that I knew. And on that very day, I realized something very wrong is happening. But I also thought it might be just some reaction of a few students.You tried to talk to them or you just stayed away?On that day, I didn’t have time to talk to anyone. I had a lot of work, and I think it was pretty important to tweet and write about what was going on in Israel. But a few weeks after that, yeah, I tried to talk to some students or not students that were protesting. For example, I walked down the street and I saw someone holding a sign with a huge picture of Zakaria Zubeidi. We should tell your listeners, Zakaria Zubeidi is a terrorist that was held in Israeli jail for creating or master planning terrorist attacks. We have a lot of facts on what he did. He’s very known. He’s well known. Also in the West Bank. I saw someone walking with a huge sign, in a Palestinian protest, with a huge sign of Zakaria Zubeidi with the wrong name. She didn’t write his right name, his correct name. It was not him. They wrote a name of someone else. I mean, this is a picture that every Israeli would recognize. Every Israeli would recognize Zakaria Zubeidi.As an arch-terrorist. She’s just walking proudly. And she’s an American native, born and raised. I spoke. I tried to talk to her.She’s not a Palestinian?

No. I asked her, Who is that? She looked up to the sign and read what he’d said. I said, No, that’s not the right guy. I actually have that on video because it was so upsetting to see that. Everything has changed on that day, and everything has changed when it comes to being an Israeli in general, as you know, but an Israeli in the US as well. I tried to talk to some protesters. I got some calls. People called me Chazir, which is a pig, but not even in the right way of saying Chazira because I’m a woman. They learned the way to say Chazir, and then they shouted me Chazir! Chazir! By the way, I didn’t have my Hebrew mic on that specific night because I didn’t know that I was going to walk through a protest. And I should mention that as an Israeli journalist here, I have no cameraman or a producer or a soundman with me. So I’m always alone. So I have to be careful. But on the other hand, I feel like Israelis really need to know what’s going on here, they need to know what what’s going on on the streets of New York, of Manhattan, that they know so well. I feel like the Israeli government, they need to know what’s going on.

Can you think of moments when you said to yourself, Wow, this is a different world? My work in 2023 until October, I mean, something that happened either in the White House press corps or in interview with somebody that was very different than how it would have been before. Something about now, and then I’d love to hear also about, as a journalist, your take on what’s happening on the right in the United States. I mean, for a long time, we’ve been talking about the left, but recently it’s been the Heritage Foundation and Kevin Richards, and Tucker Carlson, and all of that. And then the media is very connected in all of that. So just to hear the development as an Israeli of how things changed And then what your take is on the right, right now.So first of all, I’ll tell you a short story about a few days after October 7th, there’s Biden. Biden gives this really big speech. He says, Don’t throw Iran to Hezbollah. And then I come to the White House and I have an interview with a White House official, a top White House official. And I enter a room and I just got the news. We spoke about October 7th and October 8th. I just got the news that our friend was murdered. And I entered the White House and you know there’s a protocol. You don’t really get to be good friends of a White House official that you cover, and you have to be very, everything is strict, mainly when it comes to Biden’s White House. Today, it’s a bit different. I enter the room for the interview, and John Kirby walks in, and he gives me a hug, and he tells me, I heard about your good friend. I’m so sorry.How did he hear?I have no idea. I just found out 15 minutes before I walked into the White House.That’s crazy.That’s crazy. That was so beautiful. That was a beautiful moment because he wanted to come in and to give me a hug and to tell me that he cares. That was a beautiful moment because I realized that people do care. After watching those protesters under my home, I saw that White House officials really do care. And that was a beautiful moment. But of course, from then until today, a lot has changed as well. And I think that there’s something about Trump’s administration that was so important to really present to Israelis what was going on here, but also tell the White House what was really going on. Because immediately after the elections, after Trump was elected, I went to Mar-a-Lago and I met him. And I heard from some very senior people there, some of the conversations were background conversations, but I heard stuff that I got a confirmation to say that, that they were told by Israeli top officials that most of the hostages were dead. Basically, they were trying to tell Trump, You can’t get a win here. You’re not going to win a trophy if you’ll try to release the hostages. Most Most of them are dead.This is a message that Israel wanted to give to Trump?Yeah, before the inauguration.Because why?Because Israel didn’t want to have pressure by President Trump to do a hostage deal.So basically, Israel didn’t want exactly what happened.Exactly.Okay. It happened a long time later, but it did happen.I was shocked. And immediately, I’m an Israeli journalist in the room. But I also know for sure from my security sources in Israel that there are 30 to 50 hostages that are still alive. And we know that for sure. I don’t have the exact number. So immediately, I change. I’m the lady who asked questions, I’m like, Whoa, hold it. We do know that there are 30 to 50 hostages that are still alive. You must know that because these are people that became the most important people in the administration. I also met President Trump there. And I said, You must know the facts. So they were like, Are you sure? How do you know that? Who did you hear that from? And I can reveal sources, but I’m like, these are the facts. A day after that, I published that on the main news show. And of course, the families of the hostages are, they’re shocked. They’re calling me, How can we go to Mar-a-Lago? We want to tell him that our son is alive. And immediately after that, Miriam Edelson becomes a huge part of that in telling the truth about how many hostages are alive and that President Trump can gain huge grade of a win here. And then you saw on the day of the inauguration, President Trump made sure that Steve Whitkoff will get a deal done by then. And that was the first Trump’s deal that he did it with Biden. And since then, I can tell you that he really cared about that issue. Once he saw that this is a thing that he should take care of and there are people to save, he started to really care about that.He cared about it on a human level, you’re saying?Also on a human level, yeah.Not just a political chess game. Yeah. A lot of people say Trump only wants the headlines. I’m sure he deserves the headlines that are saying he saved so many hostages. But more than that, he really cared. When he heard Eli Sharabi, the released hostage. When Eli Sharabi told him something like, there was not even one kind person in Gaza, a Hamas person, no one was nice to me. He kept on talking about it. He really cared about that. It made him furious and also disappointed by the way they treated them, and he wanted them out. Of course, the Israeli government, as Trump understood, They had their own interests of prolonging the war. Of course, there were political interests, but also they thought that Hamas was not eliminated yet. So they had a few thoughts about that. But there was something about it because you asked me about how it was like to be an Israeli journalist here. There was something about those very critical moments in time of Trump is about to be inaugurated, Biden is finishing his term. First of all, to say what’s true. And second of to be there and ask the questions. Because if you ask questions about hostages, then the senior officials understand that this is something that they should have answers for.So in fact, your question is just as important as the answer that you get.I think it is. I think it is. I think that when President Trump is sitting at the oval office and he gets a lot of questions about the hostages, then he understands that he needs to take care of that. More than that, I asked him on the very first oval office meeting that he had with Prime Minister Netanyahu, was a short while after it was inaugurated, I asked him, many people say that the men who can release so many hostages deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. Will we see another deal? Will Netanyahu allow you to do another deal? So I feel like there’s something about asking the question that is very important. And on the Israeli reality, we needed that. We needed to ask those questions. We needed someone who would care at the White House because as you know, and I’m sure your listeners know, the fact that all the hostages were released were because President Trump decided that this is what he wants.A hundred percent. I mean, one can love him or not love him. That doesn’t make any sense at the moment. They are out because of him. There’s no question about that. I don’t know anybody in the world that doesn’t think that. How about your relationships with other journalists over the course of the last almost three years? Cnn, Fox, ABC, MBC, CBS, MSNBC. Have you sensed that walking around with a microphone that says, Khadashot 13, in Hebrew, News 13, Has the reaction to you changed since the war and since Israel’s become vilified?It’s so interesting that you ask. I think it has changed. I think from time to time, they need my help. When the Iranians attacked the Israeli army base, Air Force base called Nevatim, I grew up in Nevatim for a while because my mom was in the IDF for many, many years. I grew up in this Air Force base for a while. So one of the people, one of the journalists that actually was broadcasting on that very day, started asking me, Do you know anything about that army base? We have no idea where it is, if it means anything. If it’s an important one, I was like, Oh, my God, I know everything you need to know. I was broadcasting right here from my studio to Israeli TV. But while I was doing that, I was also texting other American journalists to make sure they understand what it means.Nevatim it’s a big deal.It is a huge deal. I think it’s one of the most important Air Force in IsraelIt turns out that it was actually probably more damaged than Israel wanted to let on, I think that’s the impression.But also on the day that Iran attacked Israel after Israel attacked their nuclear facilities. I mean, the last war in June, on that day, it was also important to emphasize to American senior officials what was going in Israel, how much the Iranians hit hard. It was very important to make sure they understand that because those were very important days when they needed to make a decision whether Trump should go in or not. And he made that decision eventually. But some of the images were not shown on American TV.A lot of them weren’t shown on Israeli TV either because Israel didn’t want the Iranians to know where they had hit, where they hadn’t hit.It’s true. It’s true. But eventually, I’m in the US, did what it had to do, and it was a courageous move, I think, as well. And we spoke before about, you asked me about those far-right media personalities who are taking over Twitter and social media platforms. I feel like there’s something going on in the past few weeks, even month, but mainly in the past few weeks, that some sort of anti-Semitism was unleashed. It’s unfiltered.Some of it goes back to the whole Fuentes, Tucker Carlson thing.Yeah, of course.But what do you think it is? I mean, you’re an Israeli, but you’re completely at home in America. You have your finger very much on the pulse. Everybody’s been talking about the anti-Semitism of the left for a very long time. There was a sense that, wow, we have an administration. We say in Israel, Yamin Al-Maleh. We had a full, the pedal to the bottom with a right-wing government People in Israel thought, Well, we have a right wing Christian government, Al-Maleh, here in America, and that’s good for the Jews. All of a sudden it turns out that neither the right wing nor the Christian part is as good for the Jews as many people thought it would be. So it was a person who’s very at home here, but you’re outsider enough to be an observer, what do you make of it? Where do you think it’s coming from? When you get in bed at night and think about your day, what do you think you’re seeing here in New York?Of course, first of all, you see Mamdani as a far left new leader that from what I hear, I don’t know how you see it, but I hear what he said, like the boot of the NYPD on your neck was laced by the idea of this is completely anti-Semitic.It’s the classic anti-Semitic trope. No matter what bad thing happens to you here, somewhere a Jew was behind it.Exactly. Jews control the world. So we have Mamdani on the one hand, and on the other hand, you have Candice Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, And this is a phenomena that I think might be able to change the way the administration behaves with Israel. And this is why it’s so important to talk about it and to know who are the important character is there and to try to understand what Israeli is not playing on that field. I think it’s important to say that.Maybe Israel is not addressing it enough.Yeah. Prime Minister Netanyahu, by the way, it’s mainly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk was a voice that actually protected Israel in a way. There’s some, I would say, an extreme spread of anti-Semitism after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Some have blamed Israel for it, which is-Well, Charlie Kirk was a a very big defender of Israel in a lot of ways.Yeah. He also tried to defend Israel in private conversations with his media personality friends from his agenda, but he wanted to say that it’s important to protect Israel. Some have actually blamed Israel for the murder of Charlie Kirk, which is insane.But what would be the logic of that?No logic. There’s a conspiracy there. If you want to talk about Jews doing something, you can just say a Jew did that. And that would be, that would make sense to some people, I guess, which is crazy. And so you see this type of spread of anti-Semitism on social media that is using very old anti-Semitism, like hundreds of years ago, maybe more than that, with new technology. And that’s why it’s so scary and so, it’s It’s a big threat for the Jewish community here, for Israel. And they’re using old anti-Semitism in high volumes. And that’s when you hear that, and when you hear Nick Fuentes getting such an important stage as Tucker Carlson’s podcast. And when you hear Tucker Carlson every day or once in a while, when you can hear him, or when you hear Candice Owens, you see that the Jewish thing, the Israeli thing, is everywhere filled with anti-Semitism, and they talk about it nonstop. They talk about it nonstop. And one of the things that they’re trying to do, some of them, is to affect the entire Make America Great Again movement and tell them, If we’re talking about America first, we need to talk about not helping Israel because we’re funding Israel with arms, and we’re helping Israel out. And you see that vial anti-Semitism spread in order to try to make the administration change the way they help Israel. And I feel like we’re very lucky to have people like Steve Whitkoff in the administration and Jared Kushner in the administration. They made that deal happen. They really care about Israel. They care about a successful democracy in Israel, and they cared about ending the war, and they care about a future and a thriving Israel, and this is what they’re trying implement. And when you see all the people, a lot of other people in the MAGA movement, you understand that there is a big deal here, and something might happen, and it won’t be good for Israel. And I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu always says, and this is how he presents himself in Israel, right? Mr. America, Mar America. I know America so well. I know to talk to the Americans. I know how to talk to their leaders. I know how to talk to the American people, I know the US better than anyone else in Israel. That was true a few years ago. It’s not true today. He doesn’t know what type of content this generation gets on social media all the time. He doesn’t know how to talk to these people. I don’t blame him. It’s brand new. But we need to be in a situation where the Israeli government understands what’s going on here in the US. Because young people here suffer from anti-Semitism much more. And we see that since October 7th, we see that in real numbers, and adults are suffering from anti-Semitism. And in the past few weeks, what we see on social media is just insane. It’s insanity. And I feel like Israel is not on that field at all. I mean, when Prime Minister Netanyahu went to give an interview to a podcast, he didn’t realize he was going to a platform that was pretty bad for him a few days after someone said that he was like Hitler or something like that from that podcast. So you realize that he doesn’t understand, and his people, they don’t understand that those new platforms and how to deal with them. But he must understand that. And the Israeli government must understand that because the people that are going to suffer as the Jewish people here and the Israelis, it’s going to be very bad for Israel.I think it’s important to say this is not a criticism only against Prime Minister Netanyahu, and it’s not personal. I mean, any other Prime Minister that would be in charge today, I believe, would not be able to notice what was going on in the US. They have a lot, of course, on their plate. I feel like I would criticize any other Prime Minister who wouldn’t engage as much in Hasbara here, or you know not only Hasbara, just understanding what was going on here on social media and different platforms. And I think that Israel-US relations, this is a strategic important, one of the most important things for Israel to keep on living and to have a great future. And this is the only Jewish state in the world. So we have to be very careful on the way we act or what we decide not to be involved in, to be engaged in. And this is why I think the government, and it doesn’t matter if it’s right or left, the government needs to be engaged in what’s going on here on social media, social platforms, understand what’s going on, research that, and address that. It doesn’t matter if it’s right or left. It’s just being straight and just taking care of the future of the Jewish state that we truly care about.So one of the things that I thought was, you said a lot of fascinating things, but one of the things that really made a big click for me was that your role as a journalist here, as an Israeli journalist in the United States, is not only to ask questions and get answers and give the answers, whatever, but your questions help shape the narrative. In other words, when you ask the President about hostages or you ask about hostages in the White House press room, it’s your way of reminding all sorts of people there’s a lot of live hostages, we got to get them out. So you’re actually affecting policy in that regard. And then you’re talking about people on the right, whether it’s Candice Owens or whether it’s Nick Fuentes, whoever, also trying to affect the narrative of the MAGA movement, which would then on the other side, try to affect policy. And you’re saying now that the Netanyahu administration, again, not anybody’s fault.I would just say that I published the scoop after October 7th, that Prime Minister Netanyahu did not even appoint any English speaker spokesperson to the Israeli government after October seventh. It’s a shame that we didn’t have one before, but the The fact that the Israeli government did not have any English spokesperson.To tell it’s story.Yeah. I mean, American journalists in Israel texted me, Do you know that we’re getting messages in Hebrew and we need to put it in Google Translate in order to report to the people in the US? I’m talking about the biggest outlets in the US. We need to report after we put it in Google Translate because the Israelis don’t have an English spokesperson. When we want to ask for a comment, people answer the phone. They speak English as well.So this is my question. Do you have a sense that the Israeli government is beginning to become aware of the fact that it doesn’t understand the new America? Or are you as an Israeli who’s obviously in touch with political military diplomatic people all over do you have a sense that you believe that they’re not in touch and that they’re like, as we say, they’re fine with it. Do you sense an urgency on the part of Israeli leaders? Like, well, we don’t really get the new America, we got to learn about it. Or do you sense that there’s not that sense of urgency?I I don’t think they understand how much it’s needed. Also, when you think of Prime Minister Netanyahu, he didn’t give a lot of interviews in the US since the seventh. So even that effort was not really made. When you talk about the big outlets, Fox News in the CBS news. I mean, he gave some, but not a lot. And of course, it was not enough. And I don’t think they understand it. I don’t think they’re trying to understand it. And I think that what they really think is something like, and I heard that from an Israeli official not a long while ago, something like, You know what? There’s always been anti-Semitism. They hate us because we’re Jews, so we shouldn’t do anything about it. And I told him, That’s not true. People need to know the fact. You have to address it. If you won’t address it, it’s going to get worse and worse. You have to be on that field. You have to act. You have to play on that field. Otherwise, we’ll all be screwed. I mean, for real. That’s a big issue. I want to tell you, when you talk about questions that are being asked, I think that one of the things that mainly affected President Trump was the fact that he really cares about how he’s being perceived in Israel. He really cares about being popular in Israel. He cares about being more popular than Prime Minister Netanyahu. This is something that Trump really wants to know. And when he saw the protests in Israel, having signs, President Trump, Save us, save the hostages. He was very excited about that. He posted about that, but he also wanted to be a part of, he wanted to show that movement of so many Israelis I mean, more than half of the Israelis wanted the deal. He wanted to show them that he helped them. So that was very important for Trump. So when we talk about what makes him do stuff, so of course, hearing about the hostages messages while if it’s hearing questions or watching reports on American TV, but also watching the Israelis out there calling President Trump, Help us. That’s very important. And that night at the Hostage Square, when Israelis cheered, when they heard President Trump’s name and didn’t like it, when they booed when they heard Prime Minister Netanyahu’s name, President Trump, I don’t think he won’t admit it publicly, but he liked it.I was going to use a stronger word than like.No, say it.He loved it.Yeah, he loved it. Yeah, clearly.I want to ask you one last question, not really so much about your being an Israeli journalist, but your being an Israeli. Obviously, you mentioned Ido, your partner, a couple of times. I’ll just tell our listeners that Ido is Ido Geffen, the award-winning novelist who we actually had on the podcast a couple of months ago for his really fabulous book, Mrs. Lilenblum’s Cloud Factory, which I spoke about then. I won’t speak about it now. It’s a terrific, terrific book.I loved it. I loved the book.Yeah, well, you’re biased. But in any event. You and Ido are part of, I mean, he’s a scientist at Columbia University and a novelist. You’re an Israeli journalist, but you’re also obviously part of a huge Israeli circle here in New York, when there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of Israelis here. I’m just curious how some Israelis are planning to come and stay. Some Israelis are planning on coming and definitely going back. Some Israelis are here and they’re checking it out and they’re going to see how things play out. Given everything that’s going on in America, from the right and from the left, the New York elections and everything else that’s happened, do you sense a change in the feeling of Israelis in New York about how much they fit in here or might fit in here?I think that the recent elections in New York City, Mamdani’s win, showed some Israelis here that they may need to fight for Israel’s future. But even if they’re here, it’s not like the future is so clear and welcoming. I think that this has changed changed some of the thoughts that Israelis had about New York City, particularly. But it shows a lot about the US in general. A lot of Israelis, I think the third option that you said, a lot of Israelis that are here are thinking about how it’s going to play out. Let’s see how it plays out, and then we’ll decide when we go back to Israel, if we go back to Israel. The recent rise of anti-Semitism, I think, makes them think about it more oftenly, about when they’ll go back to Israel. But a lot of Israelis here arrived after the seventh. A lot of Israelis came after the seventh. So it means after they knew about the judicial overhaul that was about to take place after they saw what was going on in Israel. So for them, they came after I heard those chants under my home on October 8th.So they knew what was going on here and they decided to come. There’s a beautiful Jewish and Israeli community here, of course. By the way, I think that Israelis don’t know enough about the Jewish community. They don’t know how much the Jewish people here care about Israel. Some of them care deeply in a way that they want to help. Some of them are trying to disconnect themselves from Israel in order to restructure their Jewish identity and try to be a proud Jew that is against Israel. But the Jewish community here cares deeply about Israel. It doesn’t matter who you ask. And I feel like Israelis don’t know enough about that, and I need to do something about it on our main news show. But Israelis here, there’s a A beautiful Israeli community here. They tried, by the way, to make people go out and vote against Mamdani. It wasn’t, of course, enough. But something about Mamdani makes people here, Israelis here, think again. I went to his victory party in Brooklyn. It took place in Brooklyn when they announced that he won. He came and he gave a speech, and I met a lot of people there. I didn’t come with my equipment, so they didn’t see that I was from Israeli news. I just spoke with them. I asked one or two questions, and immediately people talk about Israel and Gaza. Immediately people talk about if Mamdani is pro-Israel, against Israel, is he an anti-Semite? Is he not? It was a huge part of this election. It doesn’t matter that Mamdani says, Oh, I don’t care about foreign policy. I care about New York City. I care about New Yorkers and busses. This is not what people there talk to me about, and they didn’t know, most of them, they didn’t ask me. So they didn’t know who I or if I was an Israeli, there are a lot of people walking around filming stories for Instagram and stuff for Twitter. So I just spoke to people. And immediately, every other person spoke about anti-Semitism, about Israel, about how they need to stop giving tax deductions if you contribute to an Israeli cause and stuff like that. So it was a huge issue for those voters for those activists that worked for Mamdani. And this is something that we need to take into consideration when we think about the future of the Israelis here in the city.Neria Kraus, this is actually fascinating. And people who’ve listened to you and who want to follow up, I’ll just remind everybody that you have this podcast called The Kraus Report. It’s on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, US-Israel relations, American-Jewish Community, Israel and Gaza, all the stuff you’ve talked about here today, but we didn’t have enough time to go to in great depth. People can listen to you on an ongoing basis. Thank you so much for taking time to share with our listeners something about what it’s like to be an Israeli journalist in the United States at a time like this. It’s actually fascinating. I learned a ton. I’m really very grateful and look forward to seeing you on the other side of the ocean also.Thank you so much. Now you have time for a cake that we just bought in the Hungarian pastry shop here in New York because it has some memories.Yeah, Columbia memories. Thank you so very much. I really appreciate it. It’s great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

It struck me that hearing what got her to fall in love with Israel and with life in the Jewish state, and what she’s grateful for about living here, even though life here is far from simple, would be very appropriate for Thanksgiving Day.

Truth be told, I had not intended to record video along with audio; but with one wrong click, I realized after we’d finished recording that we also “accidentally” had the video, so I asked Amanda if she was amenable to us running that, too, for a Thanksgiving change, and she was.

So today, in a slight break from our norm, the conversation is video, but can also, of course, just be listened to. Let us know if you have thoughts about our continuing to us video for some of the podcasts. For that purpose, comments on this post are open to everyone.

There’s a very brief clip of our conversation above, while the entire conversation is below, just under the screenshot of Amanda’s FB post, and is available to everyone.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Here is the entire video conversation with Amanda Borschel Dan, on her journey, her love of Israel and the life she has embraced.

When we’d left Israel a few weeks earlier, it was still lined with hostage posters on both sides of the walkway, in both directions, the one for people arriving and the one for passengers departing. When our son-in-law flew home from a work trip a few days before we returned, he took this shot of a few posters remaining.

When we got back just days later, there were just three.

After two years of seeing that walkway plastered with faces that reminded us all (as they were meant to) of utter horror, even the airport’s getting “back to normal” felt like a metaphor for a subtle change that’s in the air here.

Yes, all the complicated stuff still remains, but still, it’s starting to feel different. Are we about to witness the beginning of a long overdue season of reckoning?

More on that below.

If you Google Prof. Dan Turner, a highly respected physician in Israel, what shows up in the “images” row can stop you in your tracks.

Our plan for Wednesday

Which guy are we talking about? When I first spoke to Professor Turner, I, too, was momentarily stumped. Turns out, of course, it’s the same person.

There are two extraordinary sides to Professor Turner, who is both a highly respected pediatric gastroenterologist as well as a courageous social activist who was involved in projects that will surprise our listeners during the war.

To me, those two photos represent the best of Israel — professional/medical/scientific excellence, combined with moral passion and courage. For the two years of the war, for reasons he will explain in our podcast conversation tomorrow (a conversation which deeply moved me), Professor Turner didn’t cut his hair much and let his beard grow. I suspect our listeners will find him riveting as well.

Our plan for Thursday

Thanksgiving isn’t an Israeli thing, obviously. Most of our American friends who’ve made aliyah don’t observe it any more. We still do, sort of, as I’ll explain in my conversation with Deputy Editor of the Times of Israel, Amanda Borschel Dan, on Thursday. Amanda, in addition to being a talented editor and interviewer for the TOI podcasts, is also a soulful writer, and a post that she wrote on Facebook in August touched me.

Some of the sentiments she expressed in her post struck me as very relevant to the theme of “giving thanks,” so I asked her to speak with us on Thanksgiving week. That conversation will go live on Thursday.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Ynet’s headline last night (mirrored in the Times of Israel screenshot from this morning, above) might not have seemed all that extraordinary to the casual reader, but in some ways, it was.

The day after he announced a series of dismissals of top officers and freezing of ranks of others, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir found himself in the cross-hairs of Defense Minister Yisrael Katz.

Zamir took the steps that he did after a report generated outside the army suggested that the IDF’s own investigation of itself (done before he assumed his position) had been flawed to the point that the reports were essentially useless. The “Turgeman Committee” did its own investigation and submitted scathing conclusions. The steps that Zamir took (which some people believe were insufficient or less meaningful than others might assume, because several of these officers were about to retire anyway, and many others went unpunished) followed the Turgeman report.

So why did Katz take aim at Zamir? Because, well, the IDF publicly and proudly embracing an outside investigative committee doesn’t fit that well with the government’s continuing refusal to appoint a National Commission of Inquiry. Katz, widely considered a Netanyahu yes-man, took aim at Zamir in order to make the issue anything but the idea of unbiased investigation, resignations and firings.

Zamir, who many people worried would also be a bit of a yes-man in his role as Chief of Staff, has shown far more spine than the political echelon apparently hoped. He argued that it was time to end the war when the government wished to continue it, but he did so subtly. There were other disagreements, and those, too, were kept largely private or only hinted at.

Now, the gloves are off.

It’s not only Zamir, though. Look here and look there, and you sense change in all sorts of ways. Today, to give a sense of what’s in the air, a few quick examples.

MK Michal Shir, from the Yesh Atid party , took to the podium at the Knesset (the clip, which went viral, is from the Knesset TV channel] and summed up what many people here have long felt.

Her words speak for themselves.

Far from the hallowed halls of the Knesset, out in the street on Saturday night at the Tel Aviv protest, a protester held up a sign that in its own way, mirrored what MK Shir had said. The sign reads:

There's a greater chance that I'll get arrested for a sign critical of the government than for burning a village in the Shomron [West Bank]

Don’t laugh, even if you’re tempted to. The claim is a lot more accurate than many of us might wish to believe. Precise numbers are hard to come by, but almost any search one does on-line shows that many more people have been arrested at the protests than for violence (that has at times left Palestinians dead) in Judea and Samaria (West Bank).

After that very same protest in Tel Aviv (which is now referred to as a protest for a National Commission of Inquiry rather than on behalf of the hostages, almost all of whom are back), Naftali Bennett, whose campaign is now well under way, posted this:

At the rally for establishing a National Commission of Inquiry with Yokhi and Israel Moses, the parents of Sergeant Or Moses z”l, heroine of the battle at Be’eri, who together with Sergeant Major Adir Avudi z”l, ordered: “Commanders go out and defend this place, new recruits get into the shelters!” and they pushed back the terrorist attack at the cost of sacrificing their own lives and those of more officers and fighters.

The people of Israel deserve answers about how the terrible failure happened and how we ensure that it never happens again.

Heads up!

We’re soon going to fix things! 🇮🇱

None of this is a guarantee that the Commission of Inquiry will be created. No one knows when we’ll have elections, or what the results to be. On many fronts, to be sure, turbulent days lie ahead.

Still, just as that airport looks and feels entirely different than it did just a month or two ago, it now seems like it’s possible, just possible, that with the hostage horror almost behind us, it’s no longer sacrilegious to make other issues the primary focus — and who knows …

That sounded as about as far from my comfort zone as one could get, but it intrigued me. “What do you do all day?” I asked, knowing virtually nothing about the “mindfulness world.” “I could tell you,” she said, “but go on the website—it’ll give you a much better idea.”

So I did. And though this was a world about which I knew nothing and which was unlike anything I’d ever done, I was curious—and looking for new tools to calm a life that had been upended by the war and the catastrophe into which Israel had sunk. So I signed up for the week-long retreat in Israel.

My family, who can’t really imagine me doing anything that doesn’t involve reading, talking or writing (plus some biking here and there), could scarcely contain their surprise that I would want to do something like this. One of my brothers suggested that he was going to start a family pool: how many days of no speaking or reading until he just gets up and leaves? My wife suggested an emendation to the pool: how many days until he gets thrown out?

But I didn’t get thrown out, and I didn’t leave. I had what was, without question, one of the most powerful, personal, religious, spiritual and Jewish experiences of my entire life, an experience that I have tried to take with me in the the months that have followed.

Before this retreat, I’d known nothing about the world of Jewish meditation, about the world that blends eastern wisdom with Jewish practice and text. And I found it more compelling than I would ever have imagined.

So I asked Rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels, the scholar and personality at the core of this movement and who founded Or HaLev, to speak with his about his work, his organization and the dream for Jewish life that lies behind everything that he does.

You can read more about Or Halev here.

Rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels has a doctorate in Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago and he has been studying and teaching meditation and Jewish spirituality for over twenty five years.

He was the founding Rosh Yeshiva of Romemu Yeshiva and has taught and innovated programs in Jewish thought, mysticism, spiritual practices and meditation at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, Haifa University, Yeshivat Hadar and in a variety of settings around the world.

He strives to integrate his study with his practice, and to help teach and live Judaism as a spiritual discipline.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

I’m going to start today’s conversation in a slightly unusual way, which is with a personal story. Sarah Hurwitz, who has a book now on the New York Times’ Best seller list. I was on the podcast not all that long ago. In fact, speaking about her new book called As a Jew. She’s the author also of a book that came out a few years earlier called Here All Along, which is also a phenomenal book. But she and I are friends. And I was actually reading a rough draft of her book that just came out, I don’t know, in, I guess, November, December of last year. And she said to me, We got to finish this in the next couple of days because I have to fly out to California to the Brandeis Bardeen Center, where I actually had spent many, many summers with my wife and kids when I was teaching at BCI, the Brandeis Bardeen Institute. And I said, Oh, wow, what are you going to Brandeis Bardeen for? I actually hadn’t heard that name in a long time. And she goes, I’m going to a meditation retreat. And I said, Well, tell me about it. How long is it? Whatever. She said, It’s a silent retreat for seven days. So I said, You, Sarah Horowitz, are the woman of words. You sit there for seven days and you don’t talk? She She goes, You don’t talk, you don’t read, you don’t write. I said, Well, what do you do all day? And she said, You know what? I could tell you, but it’ll be much better if you just go on this organization’s website. It’s called ‘Or Halev’, that means in Hebrew, the light of the heart, and go on the website and look at it. And I did. And for those people who know me a little bit, they probably know how far this is from my comfort zone. But I looked at this and it was so far from my comfort zone that I said to myself, I’m going to do this. This is just the next step for me, trying to figure out what this next chapter of my life is going to be about and so forth.One of the things that was actually very confusing about this in the weeks that followed was when I told my various family members that I was going to do this. My brother immediately said that he was going to start a family pool and people could bet on when I packed my bags and fled because I can’t go seven days without talking, reading or whatever. And my wife suggested an emendation, and she said, No, the bet should not be on when he leaves. The bet should be on when he gets thrown out. But the long and the short of it is, is that I did not leave, I did not get thrown out. And I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that I had a life-transforming experience and one of the most powerful weeks of my life in ways that I didn’t expect. I’m not sure really what I did expect, but it really changed my understanding of what mindfulness is all about, of what meditation is all about. I asked the person who is the founder and head of the organization, Or Halev, that runs this and many, many other programs that we’re going to hear about, rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels, to come on today and to tell us about himself, about the work, what’s the vision for Jewish life behind this organization, what’s perhaps maybe even the vision for Israeli society and Jewish communities abroad, because it does work internationally in the US, in the UK and so forth, to hear about a part of Jewish life in Israel and beyond that I think most of our listeners probably have no idea even exists.So James, thank you very much for taking time. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a really long time, and I’m delighted that so many people are going to get to learn about you and about the work that you’re doing as a result. So thanks again.Thank you so much for having me here, Daniel. Really excited to be here and talking together.So let’s just start with you. How does a nice Jewish boy from the Midwest, if I’m not mistaken, end up in Israel with a rabbinic degree, with a PhD, and doing the work that you’re doing? Most people with PhDs go ahead and do either academia or other things. You’re very much outside the usual norm of what people do. How did this all come to percolate for you in your own life?In brief, I grew up in a pretty engaged Jewish household, but not in an extensive Jewish community. We were very involved in Jewish community, but I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and then we moved to Detroit. Where I grew up, I was the only Jewish kid in my school. So not a lot of Jews right around us, but a family who was very engaged and very committed, and so had a rich, beautiful, and very joyous Jewish upbringing. Kept that with me. Then really what happened in terms of this whole progression was that in college, I hit a point where I was just suffering a lot. I was suffering a lot. I had what I came to realize, but didn’t realize at the beginning, depression, clinical depression, anxiety, disorder, and a whole series of physical pains in my body, some of which left me fairly disabled for about 10 years in terms of the arm pain I was experiencing. I’d already been engaged in Judaism at that point. I had to come to Israel for a year before I went to college on your end to your course. I had a beautiful experience there in college and opening to some more spiritual dimensions and being interested in just hearing on the side things about Kabbalah and Hasidism. At the same time, there was this tremendous suffering happening. I had a physical therapist of mine who was working with me on the physical pain. I recommend meditation as a way to deal with the suffering and the sleeplessness, mostly. For those of you who remember them, I went out and bought cassette tapes, green cassette tapes, and put them in my cassette player, which I had, and started meditating then, just five minutes a night. I just started with five minutes a night before I went to bed, which was extremely difficult for me. There was just so much challenge, so much fear, so much pain in the system. It was extremely challenging, but also quite immediately transformative. And probably the most transformative thing was just the simple fact of understanding for the first time and doing the switch of turning towards with love and compassion rather than running away from my experience. I didn’t even know I was running away from my experience. I didn’t even have the language to describe it as that, but that’s what I was doing. And all of a sudden, I had this tool to turn towards my experience and really take it in. That’s how I started on that path. That was in 1996. I’ve been meditating basically every day since then. Quite quickly, my practice grew, week by week, month by month, adding time, time, time, till I had a pretty stable, committed practice, going on retreats, et cetera. At the same time, in parallel, my Jewish life was still transforming and growing. The mystical elements of Jewish life, Hassidism, kabala, I started to delve into more. I went to do a master’s in England and Oxford and started to explore those texts in the original first. Then I came to learn in Yeshiva in Israel in 1999, and that’s really where I started to dive into the primary texts for the first time in a serious way. They were just gorgeous for me. They were beautiful, they were inspiring, they were a notion of divinity that I’d never encountered before and spoke to me in a deep way in a way that even though I had a rich and beautiful Jewish life, actually the notions of divinity that I’d been raised with were not ones that really spoke to me. That was incredibly rich. Along the way, as part of that process of growth and exploration, I went and did smichad, a rabbinical ordination with Roc Daniel Landis, which was a beautiful experience of learning with him and at Pardes.He was actually the rabbi of our synagogue, and we lived in LA. So we go way back. He’s an incredible person.Incredible teacher. I feel very, very grateful that I was able to be with him in that program. Then I went to do a PhD at the University of Chicago. But I really went to do a PhD. I remember the thought process I had. I was sitting and learning, particularly the study text, which is from the maggid of mezeritch, and I just thought, I just want to keep learning this the rest of my life. I was like, I can’t do that sitting in Yeshiva because I have to learn Gamara most of the time, which was also lovely, but not actually where my passion was. How do I do that? How do I get somebody to pay me to do that? Basically, a doctor It was the way to do that, to be able to keep doing that and get the expertise I wanted to get. I went off to do that. My work already in the doctorate and then also in the work that started after that was very much about, sometimes I try and call it spiritual archeology of Jewish spiritual practice because there are these deep practices in our tradition to a great extent that haven’t been passed down, the lineages that got cut off because of modernity, because of the Holocaust, because of all different reasons. We didn’t have access to the lived experience of those traditions. Through my work with mindfulness, through my deep practice in the Buddhist tradition, and then interaction with these texts which talked about these practices and describe the states they produced, et cetera, there was a way that I could understand and have access to those states and those texts and those practices in a way that I think most people couldn’t. That really then took off. When I brought those things together, it felt, first of all, just deeply meaningful to me. That’s where I was, and that’s what I needed. Now that I started teaching that, really primarily not with any big vision, just like this was meaningful to me, and I thought it might speak to other people, there was an immediate connection. Whether I started teaching a class which integrated text and practice together, started teaching our first retreat. The response was so overwhelming and so powerful from the people who came on retreat that we wanted to do it again. That’s really how oral love was born. Again, not some huge planning process or some big vision. It was like, Oh, this is really powerful. We can see how transformative it is. We want to do more, and we need to create some structure that’s going to really allow that to continue to happen.What does Israel fit into this whole thing?I I’ve been in Israel basically since 1999. For a few years, I was back when I was doing my doctorate. Other than that, I’ve been in Israel. This is where I live. That’s the first place where it fits in. This is just where I am, and this is where kids have grown up and have all experienced being here. But it also fits in, I think in a few ways, say things about Israel and the Jewish world in general, and then some more specifics about the Israeli experience. I think there’s a broad experience which is shared, I think, across the Jewish world, which is an experience of deep spiritual yearning. Yearning for healing, for clarity, for well-being, and yet not always experiencing that as being provided through our Jewish experience and tradition. One powerful experience for me was somebody who’s deeply connected to Judaism, was praying every day, et cetera. Judaism was a great bond for me, but it wasn’t a way out of myself. It was prayer and tfilah. It was a hug for me. It was supportive, but it wasn’t a cure, it wasn’t a transformation. I think that’s the first piece is, how do we bring these spiritual technologies from other traditions, from the scientific tradition and from our own tradition, and make them accessible in a Jewish way to a Jewish population so that we can live Jewish life in a way that is deeply transformative, just in a personal way, in my own internal experience, my relationship with my family, my community, but also out to the nation and politically and every level of that experience. That’s, I think, one piece of it, which is very important. Another piece of it, which at a certain point was more unique to Israel, is still unique to Israel, but I think, unfortunately, is now more present in the rest of the Jewish world, is really the Israeli experience of trauma. Obviously, in the last two years, that has hit a new and unprecedented level. We’re talking about a new experience of that in Israel and across the Jewish world. I think all over the Jewish world, we’ve all been carrying intergenerational trauma to whatever extent that’s showed up in our own personal life and experience and wherever we’ve lived. But in Israel, even before October 7th, I lived here through the second intifada, multiple as we know, operations, attacks.And the second Lebanon war, you were here then.It’s a constant experience and aspect of Israeli society. There’s both simply the sense of how do we provide a way of being Jewish that actually speaks to our real deep everyday needs, which includes that healing. If we’re going to provide a way of being Jewish, I think in this century, which isn’t speaking to the fact of our trauma and suffering and fear and uncertainty, then we’re missing something. We’re not doing our job as Jewish leaders and teachers if we’re not bringing that to people because that’s the reality of people’s experience. If you’re growing up in Israel, the Jewish state, having Jewish experiences, and the full spectrum of that, that may be super religious, they may be secular, reform, conservative, whatever that looks like for you, there’s a real thirst for a way of encountering and being with our tradition that’s going to provide that healing and transformation. Then I’ll say one other piece about that, which is that it’s also, I think, essential. There’s the personal piece, which is people just want healing. Of course they do, and that’s so important. But I think there’s another level to that for the Jewish world in general, and especially in Israeli society, which is that when we’re trapped in trauma and trauma responses and trauma ways of thinking, we’re not going to be creative. We’re not going to find new ways of being, new flexibility. I don’t know how we get ourselves out of this situation, boy. I wish I had the answer. I don’t have the answer, but what I don’t do know is being stuck in the same ways and patterns of response and thinking is not going to get us out. Responding in the same way is not going to provide the solutions we need. As we practice We develop an openness and flexibility to listening to others, to listening to ourselves, to discerning what’s actually going on, to not be caught in our automatic reactivity. That’s so important just on the level of my relationship with my partner, my kids, whatever that looks like. But also on the level of my relationship with my nation and politically and other people and how I respond to that. So part of what I hope is the vision of the work we do is that there’s also a really deep aspect of social healing in that. Therefore, an aspect which allows a creativity and experimentation that can create new futures that may not seem available to us at the moment, that may not seem realizable to us at the moment.Well, that was indeed my experience. We were, I don’t know, 40-ish people at this retreat, I guess. We literally didn’t talk. So you’re with people literally almost all day long, every day for a week. You don’t even know their names at the end because you haven’t exchanged. You just know, Hi, my name is, because there’s no point knowing the name because you can’t talk to them. And it also, I think, preserves a certain amount of anonymity, which is important for people there. But we in Israel, we’re very good at walking down the sidewalk and sizing people up about who they are politically by looking at their clothes, by looking at the kippah that they’re wearing, by looking at all kinds of other things. And there were some people at the retreat, let’s just say, who if I had sized them up on the sidewalk, I would say that is not a person that I would have much to talk about. Or maybe even worse, maybe that’s a person who I actually think is part of the opposition in terms of what I’m trying to create by virtue of living in this country. And we might still disagree politically. I have no idea because we didn’t exchange anything. But what I did experience, and is exactly what you’re talking about, after being in this tent with them for a week, watching them clearly be deeply moved by the same things that were moving me deeply, watching them experiment with new kinds of religious expression that they probably don’t do on a regular basis, just as I was, watching them experience the mountains and the other people in the same way. It was a reminder and a very humbling reminder to me that we have so much more in common and where our searches are so overlapping than the contemporary scene in Israel allows us to experience in many ways. I want to come back to this whole issue of diversity and inclusiveness and a social vision that maybe lies at the heart of Or Halev, and you can talk to us about it in a second. But before we do that, just tell us a little bit more about Or Halev. What does it actually do? We’ve mentioned these retreats and so forth, but it does a lot of different things. So just give our listeners who don’t know about it a sense of what’s the stuff that you have.So we have, first of all, Jewish meditation retreats, mindfulness retreats that are happening in Israel, in North America, and in the UK. They vary from as short as day-long retreats to as long as eight day-long retreats. We’d love to see you on them. You can check them out and check on our website.Some are online, right?Exactly, including online retreats. That’s right. We just had an online retreat just before Yom Kippur, Preparing your hearts for Yom Kippur. We have a series of courses that happen on various kinds of topics, often tied into the Jewish calendar and the various holidays, but also tied into various spiritual topics or working with various kinds of suffering or just being able to open our hearts. Those are happening throughout the year in various languages. Sometimes in local communities as well. We’re starting now and have started more work in some local communities, so local sitting groups and ways for people to connect. We also run a teacher training program. For those of you who aren’t new to this and are really interested in expanding and deepening your practice, we have a three-year program of practice deepening and then eventually teacher training. We have a special program just since October 7th here in Israel, which does retreats and then ongoing programming for trauma therapists. We’re working with trauma therapists themselves. People are working with Nova survivors, et cetera, all the things that’s happening here in Israel, and providing them with the treat experience that you did, Daniel, and that ongoing programming around trauma trauma around meditation, around connecting them with their Jewish life and experience. Again, just like on our normal retreats, a real range of people come from all kinds of different backgrounds and places in Israeli society who are coming together to go through those programs.Whenever this whole horrible situation that we’re in finally does die down, the trauma is going to remain, and the thousands and thousands and thousands of Israelis who are suffering from PTSD need to be treated. The people that are treating them also have their own needs. It seems like you’ve touched a niche here that, tragically, is going to be a very important niche, really, for as far as the eye can see, long after the guns go silent, as they say. Let’s talk a little bit about the faculty that you’ve brought. I have to say, and I mentioned this to you in a different context, but my career has more or less been helping to create and run educational settings. I know something about how every little detail that you get right, people just take for granted, and every little detail that you forgot to take care of or whatever people notice because it really does affect the experience. And I was literally, I was stunned by how unbelievably professional the whole experience was and how everything had been thought through. I mean, everything had been thought through. But I was also really very moved by the diversity of the faculty, by the Jewish richness of the faculty, even though not everyone, so it appeared, at least, was observant or had grown up religious or anything of the sort. They had a a real Jewish depth that doesn’t usually, in our simple thinking, get associated with the kinds of backgrounds that they necessarily had. Say something about how you find faculty, what you’re looking for, how you find people who maybe not think or up with it, who have such unbelievable Jewish depth, in addition to depth in this whole world of mindfulness and have read the literature and commonly quote the people that have influenced them. Thank you.I I think the first thing to note is just what you said, the diversity, which is very important to us. It’s important to us in terms of participation. We have people from every Jewish background, every walk of life, different identities, the whole range, which we really try to hold in a big tent. Where everybody can participate in a way that makes sense for them. That’s been, since the beginning, a really beautiful, transformative part of the experience. I remember, I was telling you before, one of our first retreats, there was a Chabbad Hassid and a secular Israeli woman who sat next to each other on retreat. At the end of their retreat, they both shared in their closing circle, you remember, they both said they looked at the other person at the beginning of their retreat and they were like, That’s the enemy. That was basically their experience. That is the person I don’t want to be. And by the end of their treat, there was a real sense of not just respect, but also care for the other person. And I feel like, okay, there’s somebody out here who their soul is yearning for the same things that my soul is yearning for. And so we’re really trying to do that. We don’t have an agenda in terms of what you do Jewishly. We have an agenda that you do things Jewishly. We’re interested in that, and then you are staying engaged, and this is a meaningful part of your life, but you can do it in many, many different ways that are right for you. And it’s very important to us that our faculty reflects that, but that also So, and this is one of the challenges and one of the reasons we have a teacher training program, we bring faculty who are deeply, deeply experienced. These are people who have been practicing for years, for years, who have done many many long retreats. So nobody’s teaching for us who hasn’t already in their own experience has a very deep aspect of practice, and that they’re teaching from that practice themselves. So that’s one thing. You’re talking about people of deep practice, years of practice, daily practice, many retreats of practice. At the same time, we need people who are bringing that depths of Jewish wisdom and the discernment and the the wisdom to be able to understand the text through practice and practice through the text. There has to be a mutual engagement in that process. That’s challenging. We’re always open to more teachers. We’re doing a teacher training precisely because we have a challenge finding people who bring all those elements together. We have this whole year-long process of training people who, just to be clear, to come on and do that program, especially at the higher levels Because of that program, you have to have years of practice already. It’s not like we can take somebody who doesn’t have practice in. No. But having that background, then we can help shape you and hone you and give you the skills you need to do in an extraordinary way. I know on the treat you were on, I was teaching on it, who has ordination, a PhD. We have extraordinary secular Israeli woman teacher, Keren, who is teaching on that, amazing teacher, Danny Cohen, who is really holding both those worlds and holding deeply trauma, and officially has lots of learning, but doesn’t have any official titles in terms of the Jewish world. All those pieces really being held together in different ways. It’s the same with our teaching that happens in North America and the UK, people coming from many different backgrounds that’s important for us, but who are all holding depth in really both of those places. That’s what’s needed to really do the work we’re doing is to have that depth in both of those places.I have to say it really, you should know, I’m sure you do know, but it actually works. When I signed up for this retreat and I looked to see who the faculty were and I checked everybody’s bios, I saw you, rabbi, PhD. I was like, Okay, that’s my guy. I guess it’s just that’s my comfort zone. I thought the other people I’m sure are going to be excellent, but James is going to be my guy. And as I’ve told you in other settings, you’re an unbelievably outstanding teacher. I mean, just unbelievably outstanding. And without taking anything away from that, they are also unbelievably outstanding people and teachers. I learned Torah from, I didn’t expect to come up with a lot of Torah. I got to say, I thought I’d learn mindfulness, I thought I’d learn et cetera. I thought I was going to test my capacity for vegan food far beyond the extent of which I’ve ever done it before. I actually did test that capacity, but managed to survive. But I learned Torah. You mentioned them by name, so I’ll do the same. I learned Torah from Keren and from Danny. I mean, Torah, Torah, like Torah.That I have quoted to other people around the Shabbat table. I remember still Danny taught something about the kruvim in the Holy of Holies, facing each other from opposite sides. Keren taught stuff, which I won’t go into, but it was really unbelievably powerful. On the depth of Jewish learning, even among people that you might think that’s not where the Jewish depth is going to come from. That’s where maybe the traditional mindfulness stuff is going to come from. Whatever was really very, to me, to come home and have gotten Jewish depth from three such very different kinds of people, was also in its own way a very profound both reminder and learning experience. I think we also tend to close ourselves. We imagine that certain people are the enemy, as you said before, which we have to unlearn very fast. But we also assume that there’s a a certain part of the bandwidth where my Jewish inspiration and learning is going to come from. And that bandwidth can be dramatically expanded when you’re in a setting where all kinds of assumptions are dropped at the door when you walk in, along with your phones, I should say, which was a very powerful experience.You guys mentioned at some point during the retreat, either at the very beginning or at the very end, That part of what makes the work that you do possible is that you actually have supporters all over the world. You have supporters in Israel and you have supporters in the States. You have supporters, I assume, in the UK and so forth. And I’m assuming that the people who support it are moved by the social vision of what you’re trying to do. I would imagine it’s not this, that they want X number of hundreds of people per year to have an opportunity to do mindfulness, which is very important and transformative for those people. But there’s a larger vision, I’m assuming, for them. And I’m assuming that there’s a larger vision for you. So I’ll ask you a future-oriented question. Or Halev is what, about 15 years old? A little bit old, about 15-ish years old. And God willing, you have many more trips around the sun to make. And let’s just say we’re talking 30 years from now, in 2055, when God willing, you’ll still be doing your teaching strongly. I will not be here to witness it, but that’s okay. You will have influenced and touched many of my trips around the sun, nonetheless. What’s your hope, not only for Or Halev, which I’m happy to hear about, but if you could describe your wish for looking back for those 30 years or 45 years it will have been by then on what this did for and to Israeli society and for and to the Jewish people. What’s the vision? Thank you. The first part of that vision, I think, really is about transforming the Jewish world. There are a few different aspects to that. One aspect is really the sense of what would it be like to have people live out their Jewish lives in a way that was profoundly meaningful and transformative and relevant to their day-to-day life? It’s not something I just do on Shabbat or I just do on a holiday, but rather day by day as I interact in my life and I think about the basic questions I have in my life, which is, how can I be a more balanced, loving person? How do I get on better with my colleagues at work? How do I show up in my community? How do I relate better to my child or to my parents? Whatever that is, questions we all have and we’re all working with, and especially at this time of the year, as we’re reflecting on tappin and tchuva and slicha, and we’re all engaged in that process. How do I actually do that? I think sometimes, it’s only my experience, I would say, growing up as a kid in some of my Jewish education, we’re superb at talking about it, but we weren’t always superb at actually giving us concrete technologies and tools to actually enable us to do that, to have that transformation, and therefore to have our Judaism speaking directly to our experience and having a new element and range of power in that way. I’ll share one just piece of that. I remember talking to some people about work they were doing with college students and trying to have more talk about mental health and well-being. So great, I’m so supportive of that. Training hillel professionals about how to refer people to social workers, et cetera, when they need help, which is fantastic, and I’m all on board. But my thought immediately came up was, That’s so great. But in some ways, what you’re telling them is, When life is challenging, turn somewhere else other than your tradition. It’s like, go farm it out to some other person who’s there going to help you with that challenge. Of course, we’re a thousands-year-old tradition who have dealt through many, many, many challenges and sufferings and difficulties, and There’s tremendous richness here and technologies for how we can meet that ourselves. That’s one piece. Can we actually make that vibrant and accessible part of the Jewish experience? Maybe not everybody wants to do that. That’s fine. That’s no problem. But can everybody know that it’s available and that these tools and this really holy work is accessible to everybody, and they can take it on when they want to take it on, and that’s the Jews in their living.That’s one piece. That, of course, translates into what does Judaism mean for people? How does it show up in their life? How does it show up in their families? If that’s the way you’re living it, it’s, I think, a radically different experience in that way. A second piece is really, as I talked about at the beginning, that aspect of really healing and transformation of our reactivity on the individual level, on the communal level, on the national level, on the political level, on the Jewish level in general. How do we live in a world where being aware of trauma and threats are real. We all know these aren’t just fantasies. We shouldn’t pretend they’re not there. At the same time, how are we not trapped in these responses which are maybe not serving wisdom best at this moment? It’s not serving the again, on a very personal level, the way I relate to my family, but also on a global level, the way I’m being active in society, the way I’m voting, the way I’m thinking about how to relate to broader issues that are out there. And if we stay trapped in our narrow ways of thinking and reacting, and in ways that have been encoded in us from fear and reactivity, and again, no blame.All of us just doing the best we can, the best we can, to deal with these extremely, extremely difficult circumstances. I’ll speak about myself as I spoke, I’m sure at the retreat, October 7th gave a blow to my practice. I’ve continued to practice, but I could feel the way it just threw me back. It’s like there was some regression there. That was the reality. I was extremely grateful for my practice and the centering it did give me and the healing it did give me. There was this very clear experience of, Oh, yeah, not independent of conditions. There are new conditions, and I have felt that. Somebody has been practicing for a long time. That was clearly felt and experienced in my body, in my heart, in my entire experience. If we can train people in this way of being Jewish and in these practices, then we can open up, we ways of relating to ourselves, the Jewish world, the broader world, families, communities, politically, at every level of it, which are going to be more creative, which are going to be more dynamic, which are going to be more healing, which are not just going to be caught in repetitive trauma patterns, And so we’re just acting out of trauma rather than seeing trauma clearly, which we need to do, and then acting out of wisdom and clarity and love and care.Yeah, that’s beautifully said. Well, two things about the war. One of them is that you spoke about the war one night at the retreat. I think it was actually Thursday night. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. And you started out by saying, You’re going to talk about the war. And my visceral reaction was, that is so what I don’t want to hear about. I came Sunday, and it took a while to learn how to do this, and I feel like I’m in my flow, and I’m really having a very powerful. The last thing that I want to hear about is this aura. Now, we were hearing planes over us nonstop. We were near an Air Force base, and we were near an artillery base. So the ground was shaking all day long, and the planes were making everything vibrate. But we didn’t have phones or watches, or connected watches, whatever. So we didn’t really know what was going on. And you get used to it. You don’t even think about it after a certain point. And when you said, I want to talk about the war, my visceral reaction was, oh, my God, really, that’s the one thing I don’t want to hear about. But you spoke about the war in such a different way. It wasn’t about geopolitics, and it wasn’t about any of the things that we commonly talk about. It was a way about how to spiritually center ourselves in light of the questions that the war had raised that I found unbelievably powerful. And while I hope and pray that this is either behind us or almost behind us, it’s lessons that I’ll take me for a very long time. And I’ve thought since then, by the way, as Jewish life in the diaspora has gotten so much more complex and so much more painful, frightening, and fraught, that I know a lot of kids of our friends, so these are people in their 20s and their 30s who are not necessarily terribly engaged in the ritual side of Jewish life, who are really struggling because Israel was always their anchor, and now Israel is very complicated for them. They’re struggling about Israel’s conduct of the war and all sorts of other issues. And I’ve thought many times that the work that you and your colleagues do is actually a huge way for these people to access Jewish tradition in a way that doesn’t require them to be, quote, unquote, religious, observant, et cetera. Which doesn’t require them to have any standing of any different sort on Israel, and still allows it not to be nambi pambi, but to very deeply, deeply, authentically and rigorously Jewishly rooted. So it feels to me that there’s a need for the work that you and your colleagues are doing in this specific Torah that you guys are bringing, combination of Jewishness and the whole meditation, the mindfulness tradition, which is so rich and wide, that I think we, Israelis, need in one way, and diaspora Jews probably need in a different way. But We all need it much more than we did two, two and a half years ago. So I think that those visions and those images are real. Those dreams are incredibly important and very moving. So let’s just wrap up by asking if there’s anything you want to leave our listeners with, either about the times in which we’re living or the work that you’re doing or ways to become involved or anything of the sort.Yeah, we’ll just say something about what you just shared and then to that entire conversation. When the war happened, we were teaching them retreats again at a certain point, and it’s very clear what Israeli society needed. I think it wasn’t as clear to us as at the beginning what, let’s say, North American society needed. I went to teach my first retreat there, and it was so clear from the first day of that retreat that the fear, the uncertainty, the feeling of the ground being pulled out from under us was such a shared Jewish experience. That’s, I think, one of the great questions of our time. How do we live in a time where the ground has been pulled out from under us? That’s the nature of our experience. In Jewish ways, but also in other ways, in environmental ways, there are so many ways that that’s happened in the world, and there’s so much deep sense of uncertainty and instability. How do we live in the midst of that instability in a way that is clear and compassionate and powerful and transformative and deeply Jewishly connected and rooted in our tradition. There’s a sense of rooting, but also knowing that that rooting is in the midst of an unstable ground, a ground that’s shifting all the time. We all need that work so deeply. Of course, young people in North America need that, and we see that on a mental health level, on a well-being level, on a Jewish level, at every level. How can we provide that help? We need it so deeply here in Israel, whether it’s the people we’re touching directly or the trauma therapists we’re working with who then are going out and working with people who have, in an even deeper way, have had that ground pulled out from one of that. It just cracked. They need to work with these people to provide some grounding again, some basis of being able to support it. That’s our work. Our work is really how to find stability and clarity and even joy and openness and connection and love in the midst of that instability. Because what isn’t going to happen is that we’re about to solve that I wish that were the case. If that were the case, I’d say, go for it. But that’s not what’s about to happen. It’s not about to happen because of our circumstances right now and because of the nature of human life. The nature of human life works like that. The question is rather, what does it look like to show up as our full human self, our full embodied divine self, even in the midst of that unstability and uncertainty. We’d love to have you join us. If that speaks to you, if you know somebody who that might speak to, We’d love to have you join us in a class on retreat, online, in person, a million ways you can do that. If you want to support the work we’re doing of working with trauma, of working with healing, of trying to create a different Jewish world in Israeli society, we’d be so grateful for that support. And most importantly, we hope you’ll take on these practices if they can be beneficial for you. That’s what we’re here doing. And we’re just thrilled for anybody who wants to come and join us in that.I’ll just end maybe with this thought that So much of what has transpired in the last couple of years has, for all sorts of very understandable, sad but understandable reasons, pulled many Israeli Jews and many, let’s say, just right now, North American Jews very far apart from each other. It’s partly politics, but it’s not only. We’re dealing with different kinds of traumas. And what one group has to do to feel less traumatized is actually heightening the trauma of the other. And it’s just very, very complicated. It’s very I had, but it’s very complicated. And as I listen to you and I think about the experience that I had, you and Or Halev actually offer a way of each of us dealing with our own traumas, which are deep with the ground, as you say, having been pulled out from under us, but in a way that’s actually going to bring us to each other. It doesn’t matter what we think about the war, and it doesn’t matter what we think about this political issue or that political issue. They matter, but not in this conversation. We can all, through the work that you’re doing, actually find our way back to Jewish life and find our way back to each other. That, to me, was really one of the very powerful things that I experienced then, and I think now we’re talking about it on a global level, but I think it’s just as true. So, rabbi, James Jacobson Maisels, for the work that you do and for who you are and what you’ve brought to the Jewish world and for taking the time to tell us about the work that you do today. Thank you very much. I hope and pray that the next time you and I see each other, because you live in the Galil and I live in Jerusalem, so we don’t bump into each other every day. But I hope that the next time we bump into each other or see each other, we’ll be able to say that at least in this neck of the woods, things have gotten somewhat better, and we can hope and pray that greater, brighter days lie.Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a delight to have this conversation. And just echoing that wish and that prayer that the next time we talk, there’s some more peace and connection in the world.Amen, thanks again.

It hadn’t occurred to me to do so, but it felt like a good idea. Attached here (above, at the very top of this post) is a recorded version of the (obviously not-recorded) Shabbat morning, version.

We’re making the full recording available to all our subscribers. I’m very grateful to the Jewish Center for this invitation.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

ELEVEN YEARS

Hadar Goldin z’l has been returned to Israel. More than eleven years after he was killed in the 2014 conflict with Hamas and his body was kidnapped into Gaza, his parents and his family have some sort of closure. Not the closure we wish they had, not the sort of closure we were blessed to celebrate with other families just a few weeks ago, but still, closure.

All our many flaws notwithstanding, I still think that Israel’s unique in many ways, including its being a place where the return of a single body can be an issue that attracts the focus of an entire country. After Shabbat was over a few days ago, when it appeared very likely that Hadar’s body would soon be returned, IDF Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, went to see Goldin’s family in their home. That, in itself, is quite something.

The IDF posted a photo of their meeting, with a very brief text, on its FB page.

The Chief of Staff met yesterday with the family of the fallen and abducted soldier, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, of blessed memory, regarding all the efforts made over the past years for his return. During the conversation, he emphasized the IDF’s commitment to act toward bringing back all the fallen soldiers held captive.

The IDF embraces the bereaved families and will continue to accompany them and act with transparency and sensitivity.

And my friend, Andrew, shared with me a video of the Kaddish being recited at “Abu Kabir,” as the Forensic Institute is known, as soon as the identity of Goldin’s body was confirmed.

Where else?

THIRTY YEARS

Last week, the Jewish world marked the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin, z’l. My sister-in-law had signed up to watch a ceremony (in the States) online, and asked me to watch with her. So I did.

It was, of course, dignified. The speakers were all very articulate. And the evening was appropriately thoughtful, somber and sad.

Yet the shared basic claim was simply silly and wrong. Essentially, all the speakers said the same thing: had Yigal Amir not murdered Yitzchak Rabin, we’d have had peace by now.

That, tragically, is myopic. After all we’ve seen over the past two years, after all we’ve learned about Palestinian attitudes to Israel (“from the river to the sea,” we should recall, does not mean “two states”), one can imagine that had Rabin not been killed, Oslo would have led us to peace?

It’s ludicrous. And it saddened me that such obviously intelligent people would harp on something so obviously mistaken.

What’s not all that well known is the fact that it’s not even obvious that Rabin himself thought that Oslo would bring peace. As I note in my ISRAEL: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn (pp. 367-368),

According to some sources, even Rabin was privately beginning to give up on Oslo due to the terror it had unleashed. Former defense minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon wrote years later, in 2008, that Rabin had told him that the prime minister “was going to ‘set things straight’ with the Oslo process, because Arafat could no longer be trusted.” And in an interview with one of Israel’s leading newspapers, Dalia Rabin, the prime minister’s daughter, said in 2010, “many people who were close to Father told me that on the eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo process because of the terror that was running rampant in the streets, and because he felt that Yasser Arafat was not delivering on his promises.”

Ya’alon’s and Dalia Rabin’s accounts might or might not be accurate. Even if they’re wrong, and even if Rabin himself had not despaired of Oslo, thirty years later it’s, very, very hard to imagine that that agreement was going to lead to peace.

Jews cannot afford myopia.

That said, though, Rabin’s assassination was one of the most horrific events in all of Israel’s history, and one would thus have hoped that commemorating and honoring Rabin’s memory—whether or not one agreed with him—would evoke wall to wall participation.

Alas, not. As you might note in the above video featuring MK Gilad Kariv on the occasion of the Knesset’s gathering to honor Rabin, Prime Minister Netanyahu chose not to be present.

Really? Is there really nothing at all that is just sufficiently sacred to warrant setting aside all differences for an hour or two of memory?

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EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS

Last week, on the subject of the New York City elections, I shared (without comment) an article from the New York Times in 1934 about a group of German Jews who voted for Hitler (I am not in any way comparing Mamdani to Hitler, obviously). Many readers were rather stunned by the NYT article, but one, a historian, kindly wrote me to share a bit of followup to that story, of which I was not aware. I’m very grateful to my friend, the talented author, Professor Rick Richman for having taught me this little bit of history.

For those who did not see the original Times story, I’ll post it here once again, and then the subsequent followup.

The above article was published in August 1934. And here’s the postscript from the Times, on November 24, 1935, just fifteen months later:

It’s worth recalling, especially this week, that what started out as simply “broken glass” did not end that way.

It is already three years that I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry... I continue to warn you incessantly that a catastrophe is coming closer... I see that you are not seeing this because you are immersed and sunk in your daily worries... in this 12th hour: In the name of God! Let anyone of you save himself as long as there is still time. And time there is very little.

“How did they not leave before it was too late?” Israeli kids are taught to ask, from a very early young age. After all, in hindsight, it seems patently obvious that it was time to get out. But life is complex, things are never as black and white in the present as they seem in retrospect and it’s never easy to leave—or to know to where to go (there wasn’t even a Jewish state when Jabotinsky made that statement, and the British had closed Palestine to Jews while the US had closed America to almost everyone).

This core claim of classic Zionism, though, that the Jews should have seen what was coming long before it was too late, is so deeply embedded in Israel’s ethos that what is happening in the Diaspora today (and for Israelis, what is particularly fascinating and worrying is the recent election of Zohran Mamdani in New York) that Diaspora current events seem to make an argument for the Jewish state, all over again.

But … the Jewish state is not exactly drowning in a sea of self-confidence. These are complex times in Israel, and we have—on numerous occasions—pointed to the statistics of Israelis leaving the country … though where those leaving now might go to is much less obvious than it might have been a couple of years ago.

So, if it’s time to leave the Diaspora before it’s too late yet it’s also (say some) time to leave Israel before it’s too late, where should a Jew go? That classically Jewish predicament, which is neither new nor lighthearted, lies at the core of the following clip from Eretz Nehederet (the subtitles are theirs, make sure you have “mute” turned off), the beginning of which is also posted at the top of this post.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Yet while the clip above got thousands and thousands of views, lots of “likes” and more than a thousand comments, the Eretz Nehederet clip that really touched Israelis in recent weeks was devoid of cynicism, and was absent all existential angst. It was just pure joy, pure gratitude, and evoked more than a few tears.

Alon Ohel, one of the living hostages released in the final group, had long been much discussed in the Israel press. A talented pianist who practiced even when in his cage in the tunnel by tapping his fingers on his legs, whose eye injury had not been treated by Hamas so there was worry that he would be blinded in one eye (Israeli doctors have some confidence that they can restore at least some of the sight in that eye) and who was portrayed by other hostages who had been with him as so fragile that they feared he might not survive without them once they were released, has so far proven much more resilient than many feared.

And what better way to celebrate the end of at least that phase of the horror by bringing in on to Eretz Nehederet to … play the piano. Israelis know the entire cast of Eretz Nehederet, who sing along with him. Who each of them are and what characters they play on a weekly basis doesn’t matter so much at this moment.

Here is the song (words by Meir Ariel, melody by David Broza, two of Israel’s musical giants) first in Hebrew, then in English from LyricsTranslate).

And then, the video of Alon Ohel playing for the entire country that had prayed for his return.

UNDER THE HEAVENS We came here under heaven the two of us like a pair of eyes We have time under heaven in the meantime we are still here You and me you and me you and me and our wide bed to give love Night and day night and day night and day and the smile apologizes that he is lazy We came here... The two of us are one the two of us are one the two of us are one one perfect and round perfect and strong Come we will give come we will give come we will give I will allow you to give to give to me to give to you We came here... And despite the gap and despite the pain and despite the sorrow I love and love and love...

Numerous Israelis pointed out that Alon Ohel’s demeanor seemed to change even during the song—playing like that, with the famous and much-beloved cast, appeared to be part of his healing. The kiss on his head towards the end is beyond. … (Once again, a reminder to make sure you have “mute” turned off)

As of this writing, at this very moment, Israeli news is reporting that Hamas, after eleven years, has apparently just returned the body of Hadar Goldin, z’l. If it is determined the the remains are really his, yet one more element of this nightmare will have been put to rest.

And soon, hopefully, we can start to rebuild — what that might take, we’ll discuss more during this coming week.

On October 6, 2023, if someone had mentioned to you the “Gaza Envelope”, would you have known what that even was? If the answer is “no,” you shouldn’t feel bad. A huge proportion of Israelis had never heard the term, either. Most had never visited, and almost no one had ever stayed there—because there was nowhere to stay.

As Israel begins to look beyond the war and to undertake the enormous task of rebuilding—the south, the north, the army, social cohesion, Israel’s international reputation and much, much more—a group of builders and investors seeks to make Kibbutz Nir Am ground zero for some of that renewal. They plan a hotel, a healing spa, an Eyal Shani restaurant and much more—to make the Otef a place one can visit and stay, rather than quickly drive through before heading back to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem to sleep.

The project is already getting some press

but there’s a lot more to learn, and today, we hear from Adir Waldman and Simone Gross, two of the people who want to bring not only the hotel, but Israel itself, to renewed life.

Once you’ve heard today’s podcast conversation, if you’re interested in investing or becoming involved in other ways, you’re invited to reach out to Office@niramhotel.com.

Adir Waldman has spent the last 15 years leading the Tel Aviv office of an international law firm, advising on investments into Israel. Adir is active in nonprofit organizations, among other roles, serving as Chairman of microfinance lender KIEDF. He resides in Tel Aviv with his wife and four children.

Simone Gross is an impact investor. Prior to the Nir Am Project, Simone was a Managing Director and Head of Investments at Maycomb Capital where she oversaw a mission-aligned private debt outcomes financing fund. Prior to that Simone was a structured finance lawyer. Simone is active in nonprofit organizations including American Friends of Leket Israel. Simone resides in New York with her husband and three children.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

I think it’s fair to say that before October 7th, 2023, many people who are listening to this episode had never heard the phrase, The Gaza envelope, Otef Aza. They had probably heard of Sderot because Sderot was unfortunately in the news far too often because of Hamas rockets. They knew that there were playgrounds built in Sderot in which there were little pipes that kids could crawl into under the seesaws and under the swing sets, so that if they heard a siren and they only had 15 seconds, they could get in. But that there was a string of kibbutzim all along the Gaza border, that these kibbutzim were of a very unique sort and had a very unique history, that they had a certain ethos about agriculture, about Zionism, and, of course, as we know with terrible irony these days, about reaching out in many cases to Palestinians and Gaza and trying to work with them, some of them driving them to hospitals in Israel for treatment and all sorts of things.I think most of the people listening to us today literally had no idea that all this existed. Even if they were very very frequent visitors to Israel, I’m willing to bet that their trips took them to Jerusalem and to Tel Aviv and to the Sea of Galilee and to the Galilee and to the Dead Sea and maybe to Beer Sheva to see Ben Gurion University or to go to the Sde Boker where Ben Gurion spent quite some time. They’ve been north to Rosh Ha’Nikra. But if you filled in like with a crayon, the map of Israel, where all these various tourists and visitors to Israel had been, the area around Gaza, the Otef, would probably not not get colored in. And that wasn’t really because of security concerns for most of those years. It was just because it wasn’t on our radar. Now, obviously, for the most tragic reasons ever imaginable, the Otef is a very, very well-known term. The Gaza envelope is very well known. And we’re all aware that we, as a country, are trying to rebuild it. The government is helping to rebuild the kibbutzim. We’ve had on the podcast previously a young man named Roi Azizi, who’s actually heading up a an initiative to get lots of young people, so far, hundreds, but hopefully thousands of young people, to move to the Otef. He’s doing it in the Otef and he’s doing it in the north as well. To say to young people, you’re working remotely. Don’t work out of your apartment in Tel Aviv. Get rid of your apartment in Tel Aviv and go north, go south. We’ve had lots of people on who have done all sorts of projects. We’ve heard from Izhar Armoni, who’s done work to try to bring high quality education back to the Otef and to the north so that people won’t feel like they’re in the periphery and for whatever reason don’t want to to move back, we’ll not have that reason. There’s lots of things that are being done to overcome the horror of what happened at the Try to rebuild. Today, we are meeting with two other people who are involved in a very, very different project, which really struck my fancy when I heard about it. I’m therefore very glad that they were willing to come on today to share with us their plans, their thoughts, their dreams, and so on and so forth. Adir Waldman has actually been on the podcast once before as part of a microfinancing project that he’s with, and we can make notes of that in the notes for today. And Simone Gross is new to the podcast and is also a partner with Adir in this project of actually building the first hotel tourist area in the Otef. So Adir and Simon, thank you both very much for taking the time to join today. Adir, let’s just start with you, even though you’ve been on the podcast before. Tell people a little bit about your background in general. You’re speaking to us from Tel Aviv. I’m in Jerusalem. Simone is in New York But tell us a little bit about your own background and then how you specifically got involved in this project or came up with the idea for this project. And then we’ll come to Simon.Adir WaldmanSo first of all, thank you very, very much for having us, Daniel. It’s an honor to be with you and to be here together with Simon. As you said, I have been once before privileged to be with you to speak about a microfinance organization that I chair. I’m a lawyer, have been in Tel Aviv for 15 years representing a large international law firm here. And the story of the project is pretty simple. I woke up on October 8th, and like everybody else, in this magnificent country, I began to think about, what am I going to do to help? And I guess I should say also for our listeners, like a lot of people in the diaspora, I began to think, what’s my role? My wife, bless her soul, ran and did milu’im. And I’m 50 years old and I started thinking, I don’t know if that’s the highest and best use of my time. My first impulse was to build a family home in the Otef. And pretty quickly, I realized it’s not a great idea and it just doesn’t have much impact. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the brilliant idea that Roi Azizi had to actually start bringing people here.But I thought along similar lines, actually. That gives me some encouragement that he and we are thinking along similar lines. I started thinking about What does it mean to have a home? What does it mean to call a place home? And how does hospitality work as part of that? And in parallel, at the same time, also, again, like many Israelis, I was spending a decent amount of time in the Otef. We have a big family car. I was bringing stuff down. I was trying to help as best I could. And it became evident very quickly that there was no place to stay down there. It was just immediately obvious. And so putting these two strands together, I had a light bulb moment, I would say as early as the second or third week of October 2023, where I said to myself, That’s it. If I can build, not a home, but if I can build a place that lots of people want to come and stay and feel at home, that can really have some impact on the rebuild. And the thought was, When this war ends, I was thinking this back in 2023, and I didn’t realize it was going to take this long, but when this war ends, there’s going to be a surge of visitors to the region. If there is no place for them to stay, what will happen is what you see happening today. Eighty busses a day arrive in Sderot. People get off. Probably you’ve done it, Daniel, and lots of our listeners have done, I’ve done it, Simone has done it. You get off the bus, you do a little tour of the police station that had to be destroyed, or of the Nova site, or of a kibbutz, you buy a Coca-Cola, you get back on the bus, and you go back to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. And that’s true, whether you’re from Israel or from abroad. And so the thesis is there’s a real market opportunity, and we can make money for our investors, and at the same time, we can have a huge impact on the ability of the region to regrow itself.Well, great. Well, we’ll talk about the impact that this is going to hopefully have on the region itself, and we’ll come to Simone in a second. I just want to share with you, since I didn’t know that part of the story before you spoke, Adir. I think we were about two months into the war when we had actually representatives of all of our kids, one either them or their spouse, at the Shabbat table. And one of my kids was just, he was called up on the 7th and was outside Gaza. He didn’t go in that day. And was exposed to the horrors of what had happened. Because when the soldiers started coming out on the 7th and the eighth. The army didn’t know then that it needed psychologists as much as it needed doctors. He was called up because in addition to whatever unit he was in, he was also a medic. They just called up all the medics on the 7th because there were these rumors, lots of wounded people, nobody knew that they either needed tragically coroners or orthopedic surgeons. So the medics ended up having nothing to do. So he was hanging around with hundreds of other medics, and the soldiers started to come out and told stories that shook him to his very core as a young father It took him many, many months to even be able to smile about anything. But they were sitting at the Shabbat table, I’ll tell you this, for the reason, and I said to everybody at the table, Listen, I’ve been talking to Ema, and I think that maybe we should build a home in the Otef. My wife had already said to me, Okay, whatever if you think. One of my kids’ spouses, who’s not always a huge advocate of my brilliant ideas, shall we say, said, That’s actually a great idea. I was a little floored by that. And then the same son who had been called up on the 7th said, That’s a lovely idea. I want you to know that if you and Ema move to the Otef, I and my wife and my children will I will never, ever, ever visit you there. This is a kid who was in a very, very, very combatty unit for eight years. He’s not easily frightened by very much. But he said to me, and I’ll never forget it, he said, I understand, but I don’t understand before, the Otef is never, ever, ever going to be safe, and I will never bring my kids there. Now, I don’t know that he would say that today.I don’t think that any of us in November or December of 2023 could have had any idea how much this region was going to change with Hezbollah, with Syria, with Iran, and even with Hamas, which is not completely destroyed, but is certainly largely debilitated, and God willing, will be even more debilitated as time goes on. But I only mention that long story as a way of long a bit of introduction to Simone by way of saying that for most Israelis, not only we do not go to the Otef when the idea was raised after the war started, for many people, including this kid who chose to go to a combat unit for eight years, it was a complete nonstarter. He said, My kids are never going And I don’t think he would say that now, but I just want to emphasize, again, a lot of us had this instinct of building a house there, but a lot of us also realized, I mean, what impact is that really going to have? And I think it brought home, at least for me, how much even a younger generation of kids who’ve been in combat units were nervous about it. If we can get people from across the globe, Israelis, but also diaspora people as well, to start seeing the Otef as a quasi home away from home, we’re going to change a lot of things. We’re going to change financial realities on the ground, and we’re going We’re going to change the lives of people there, but we’re also going to change ourselves and how we think about that area. But anyway, that was a long-winded editorial.Adir Waldman I just want to say, and maybe I shouldn’t share this because it’s against our interests, and Sima may kill me afterwards, but we had the same conversation at our Shabbat’s table, and my wife said to me, I love your idea. I love you for having the idea. Use any family budget you want. I’m never sleeping there. And I think Sima and I both fully appreciate that the vision that we have begs this question. And there are a lot of tough issues, and we need to work through them.But I think that a lot of people would respond differently. Anyway, we’ve cut you off twice before you said a word. So why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to this project and what your role in it is.Simone Gross Thank you. I will. I’m just going to respond to a bunch of those threads before I get there, if you don’t mind. First of all, I think Tamar has come around a bit in the sense that-Adir Waldman Tamar is my wife.Simone Gross Sorry, I hope it’s okay that I invoked her. That as time has gone on and as we’ve talked about the different design elements, there was a moment in time where we thought this would be a great glamping site. And then we realized people probably really want to be in a structure. And so there’s a lot that has gone into our design that’s not just local. It’s taking into account, how will people feel about sleeping a mile from the border? We’re going to activate bomb shelters. We’re going to think about how to just give, use architecture to make people feel more secure and sound. But the other bit that Daniel and I think about as we talk, and first of all, thank you so much for having us on. This is really amazing that we get to get this exposure and let people know about all this. But I was talking to a friend of mine who was a US veteran who served in Afghanistan about this project and about how not only is this a model for rebuilding Israel, but there is something in this where we can think about this as a model for rebuilding Building a post-conflict zones altogether.But there’s something about Israel in the startup nation where we can do post-traumatic growth and we know how to rebuild right away. But people aren’t talking about this in Ukraine yet, but at some point, they’ll need that, too. And so he was saying to me, and I hadn’t thought about this at all, but it struck me with what you were saying about, I guess it’s your son-in-law, that he would so love to do this in Afghanistan so that he could have his fellow US vets go to Afghanistan and see it thrive. That there’s something about the people who served in that exact space needing to go back and have that catharsis, which is just like an additional profile and target audience that, yes, we’ve talked about PTSD therapy in general for our guests that come, but specifically thinking about how to serve the servicemen who’ve been there was just, the fact that he went there so quickly was really profound and hit home again, just the many layers of impact that a project like this can have. But sorry, to answer the question you asked me many moons ago, I’m an impact investor based in New York. Prior to October 7th, I had always worked on US issues. I was a structured finance lawyer before that, and I have an urban planning background, and so I had worked on impact investing and tax advantage investing and stuff like that in the US. I had the privilege to meet Adir because he is way too humble about his work at Coret. And he has this amazing loan fund program that he’s working on for farmers in the south. And so that’s how we really first got to know each other. But then through that, we spent a lot of calls talking about this project because in my immediate post October 7th activation, it was, okay, how can I use my expertise and just do a lot of friendly advising to fellow Travelers and Impact investing in Israel? I knew Social Finance Israel and others before the 7th. So Adir and I spent some time together that way, and I just immediately fell in love with this project. It hits so many on how to do rebuilding correctly and how to have a sustainable future for the region, the larger region, the country, diaspora Jews. There’s something for everybody here.Terrific. Which one of you wants to tell us, basically, what is this project? What are you trying to build? What’s it going to look like? What’s its size? What’s its nature? Are we talking about Motel 6? Or are we talking about the Trump Towers somewhere on Fifth Avenue? How many people? What’s the schedule, et et cetera. Who wants to lay out the project?Adir Waldman Go ahead, Sima. Run.Simone Gross All right. Thank you. And please jump in as I know you will, wherever you have something to add. So it’s actually neither. It’s not a Motel 6 or a Trump Tower. It’s what we’re calling barefoot luxury, which is comfortable, unfussy, but elevated, and beautiful, and comfortable. It’s going to be about 100 rooms, over two sites. There’s the main site, and then where the historic guest house already is Kibbutz Nir Am. It’s at Kibbutz Nir Am, which is across the street from Sderot. Kibbutz Nir Am is a beautiful kibbutz that has always wanted to have a thriving hospitality business. So it’s really exciting to be able to partner with them to do this. We’re going to have an amazing food and beverage program by Ayal Shani.Who is a very well-known Tel Aviv and Jerusalem chef who has all kinds of high-profile restaurants in Israel and beyond.Simone Gross Right. I believe he’s a Michelin-starred chef, and he’s very focused on farm to table. And so it’s just the perfect pairing when we think about the way the Otef can be the bread basket of Israel and how we really want to be as local in our supply chain as possible. We’ve been working with amazing Dana Oberson on design. She’s done fantastic hotels in Israel, really understands modern Mediterranean, which is the look and feel that likely we’re going to have here with elevating the kibbutz experience. So for someone like me, I get to come and cosplay that I get to be on a kibbutz, but it’s not the kibbutz guest house that I would have stayed on in my Mahak summer. So that’s what’s really exciting. We have amazing advisors on this, and And what we’ve heard over and over again from hospitality industry veterans is we should build a hotel that we would want to stay at. And so Adir and I like to travel a lot, and we like to travel nicely. And we like good service, and we like beauty, and we like relaxation. And why shouldn’t all of us have all of that at the Otef? So that’s what we’re thinking about. Also from a economic development strategy and a placemaking strategy, if we start more high-end, we hope that this will spur an ecosystem of other hotels. And in fact, there is friendly competition among a couple of other projects. We all want to be the first one out. And so there’s room for the whole range. This is just the spot that we’re at, because to your point, I don’t know, sorry, if we made this in the prep or once we already started, but there’s no place to stay. And we all had this big gap in our imagination of what the Otef was, and it’s still there. And to your point about the 80 busses that come to Sderot every day. And I’ve done that like everyone else. There’s no stickiness there yet, other than what we’ve learned is the term of dark tourism, so the memorial sites. But there actually are a lot of tourism assets. They just haven’t coalesced into a tourism ecosystem yet. So Before October 7th, there was a study that came out by the Ministry of Tourism, I believe, talking about all of the assets, the tourism assets and the need for rooms in the Otef. And then obviously the conversation had to be paused. So it’s there. And the land is zoned at Nir Am. It’s there. All the conditions are there. It’s just, unfortunately, the crisis that was October 7th brought the spotlight that is needed to get all three of us to be paying attention to this and talking about it and thinking about how do we finance it and get it going. So this is the part we could do.Adir Waldman A lot of people ask us who our audience is. And we always say, look, our audience is really everybody. It’s all of our friends from abroad who come and visit Israel. Like you said, they go to Tel Aviv, they go to Jerusalem, they go to the Galil. We want them to go to the Otef, too. And it’s our Israeli friends who spend insane amounts of money going to mediocre hotels in Israel for the weekend because there’s not a lot of option here. And they should go to a great hotel in the Otef and enjoy.Simone Gross And the corporate traveler who has, in Israel, there’s a regular benefit, and you both know this better than I do, that there are retreats and staying. This is such an obvious way to inspire your employees, to do corporate social responsibility, to give back, to spur the economy through that. So we think that’ll be a big piece of it. We expect federations and missions will all want to come and stay because, again, it’s annoying to stick everybody on a bus forever. You’re going to come to your volunteer, pick cucumber at a farm in the south, and then go see Reim and go see the kibbutzim, and then get back on the bus. I’m dealing with this myself. I’m planning my trip with my family in December, and I have three kids. They’re 12, 10, and 8. So I’m trying to decide how much of the Otef do I show them? And so between balancing that and wanting to show them inspiring and rebuilding. Luckily, they want to see what mom’s been working on, so we’re going to Nir Am. But it’s not there yet. It’s clear that it’s needed.Adir Waldman I was going to say, just to put some numbers on this, the Ministry of Tourism says that before the war, there were 300,000 tourists a year to the Otef, primarily in the Darom Adom season.Which is the flowers, the calaniot. What are they called in English, calaniot?Adir Waldman Red anemones.Anemones, yeah. Okay.Adir WaldmanCurrently, that’s It’s tripled to a million tourists a year or visitors to the region.Mostly going down to see the sites related to October 7th, I’m guessing.Adir WaldmanExactly.Simone Gross And a lot of volunteers.Adir Waldman And the prediction by the Ministry of Tourism is that in the aftermath of the war, that number will double again to two million a year. So we’re talking about a rise from 300,000 a year to two million a year. So it’s pretty significant. And just to go back to the point that was made earlier, look, a lot of the current visitors are drawn in the first instance by wanting to see what happened. Our idea is it’s fine to go and see what happened. It’s important. People are going to do it. I’m I’m sure, for the next 50 or 100 years or more. But we also want to show off the best that the Otef has to offer. So go to the Nova site, go to a kibbutz, but in the evening, have an Eyal Shani farm-to-table restaurant with local Negev wines or or hear music from a band that grew up in Sderot, or go hiking or swimming, or learn about the ancient history of the region, or arts and culture. There’s so much other stuff to do.Or the early modern history of the region. Why did all those people seem to get built there? Why did they decide to put them there? There was a reason for that. They’re not there by accident.Simone Gross Exactly. We actually have the water security museum right at Nir Am, so we can definitely do that. But I think to your point, and this is from my very New York-centric perspective, it’s like New York after 9/11. You’re coming to New York, particularly Southern Manhattan, for a lot of reasons. You may or may not go to the 9/11 Memorial, but you’ll still stay at a hotel down there that had to be spurred. We have to incentivize that economic development after 9/11 there. And so it’s similar in that way. And admittedly, I came to this project with that focus about the near term dark tourism. People need a place to stay while how they bear witness. But I’ve learned that there’s so much more to do. You can do a wine tour, you can do agri-tourism, there’s cycling, there’s all of that that also pre-existing. We’re not manufacturing it, but it’s multiplying.I want to ask you in a minute about the relationship between the region and this project. To what extent people in the region are involved in planning it, to what extent you see them working in it, what you think the impact on it financially and economically is going to be for the region. But before we do that, I just want to ask you quickly, so at this facility that you’re talking about building, just to give people a fleshier sense of it. So there’s 100 rooms. You said that there’s conference sites. I guess there’s some maybe like a small auditorium or conference rooms or something of the sort. What else is there on the site, as you imagine it now?Simone Gross The most amazing pool area because we know it’s going to be hot there. Great bar, the restaurant. There’s already the Historic Green Pub at Nir Am, so there’ll be music just there. There, but we’re also focusing on wellness. So there’ll be a great spa. We’ve been talking about doing artist studios. We got an idea, and I guess we’ll see how this goes today for me and Adir, whether or not we should also include podcast recording studios and just general content making, because there’s expected to be a real surge in creativity and just a maker ethos, particularly because of where it is in the Otef after this. And that part of recovery and healing and building is just creativity and making. And so I love the arts. I’m more of an arts person than, let’s say, music or podcast or whatever. So that’s where I go. But we want to leave it open to people when they come. And we also really want, to your point, your later question about the region, and we’ll get there, we’d love local artisans to be a part of that. So we expect to have artists in residence, to have locals come to the site and lead a pottery session or flower pressing or cocktail making from the kitchen garden and things like that. So we’re going to really ground it in the land.There was an exhibit, I’m going to guess about a year ago, I don’t remember exactly when it was. My wife and I actually went to see it at the Anu Museum, which was composed largely of art that had been done by people in the Otef. But obviously, there’s no place in the Otef to exhibit it. I mean, it was a pretty big exhibit, and there was certainly no exhibit space like they had at Anu, which is on the Tel Aviv University campus. And it used to be called the Diaspora Museum to show it. So there’s a huge arts center there, but not nearly well known enough yet. So I’m sure that that’s also going to explode once you guys bring people down and they can also sell their work more easily. It’s going to obviously one thing is going to feed off to another. Let’s go to the region. To what extent people had this idea before the war? You’re saying, whose idea was it before the war? Why did it not progress? To what extent are they involved with you guys in planning it? Are there issues there? I mean, between Kibbutzim or these Americans, one is an American transplant, one is an American-American coming, and they’re going to do a hotel in our neighborhood. There’s all those kinds of things that can come up in any one of these projects, no matter how well-intended they are. This is obviously completely well-intended. Talk a little bit about the impact as you see it on the region and then how the region is involved in all this.Adir Waldman There’s a lot to say about that. I just want to start before I hand over to Sima to talk about the wider regional impact about Kibbutz Nir Am in particular. We spent a lot of time looking at lots of different sites. We met with every single regional council head in the Otef. By the way, every single regional council wants tourism. They believe that tourism is a part of the regeneration story. The government of Israel wants it, Tkuma wants it. In the end, we ended up in Nir Am. In addition to the things Sima said about it being beautiful, I just want to make a few points. Number one, it’s 50 minutes from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It’s basically as close as you can get to the center of the country while still being in the Otef. It’s on a train line. There’s a train stop right at the front gate of the kibbutz. But two points in particular. Number one, the Kibbutz is one of the very few places in the Otef that was successfully defended on October 7th. So unlike some of the other kibbutzim that we spoke to, although the kibbutz obviously suffered in the aftermath of October 7th, everyone was evacuated forcibly on October 8th, and they spent 10 months living in hotels and guest houses in the rest of the country. But they didn’t suffer the physical destruction and the loss of life that a lot of other communities suffered. And so from that perspective, it made a very welcoming home for us. And the other thing is that they had land that zoned for hospitality, which is very rare and very difficult to get. So we’re super excited about Kibbutz Nir Am. We do want, by the way, you were asking about local employment or regional employment. We intend to make that a focus. 80% to 90%, we hope, of our staff will be local, whether that means from Nir Am or from the wider region. Nir Am is our partner, we should be very clear. We did have long and difficult conversations, just like you suggested, about putting a hotel in their backyard. And kibbutzim are complicated organisms. But we are very proud of the fact that all of these long and difficult conversations ended in one place. And the way they ended, by the way, just to put a little anecdote on it, is that somebody from the kibbutz stood up, somebody from the older generation stood up and said, Guys, everybody has made valid points tonight. But at the end of the day, the overriding concern of all of us is that our children and grandchildren feel like they have a future on this kibbutz. If we want that to happen, we need industry. We need business. We need arts and culture and visitors. There’s no question. We need to take advantage of the fact that we have a beautiful piece of land zones for our hospitality. When can we start? And that ended the conversation.It sounds a little bit like that line out of Chaim Chazaz’s short story, The Sermon, Hadrashah, where this old kibbutz guy, he gives a whole lecture about history and Jewish, with the lack of Jewish heroes in Jewish history. But again, it’s the kibbutz gathering, and then one old guy stands up and steals the show with a very poignant remark. Obviously, a totally different subject, but you can envision it happening back then. You can envision it happening now. Okay, Sima, you wanted to take a little further.Simone Gross Yes, sorry. I will, but just on some of those points. If there’s ever a movie like that scene is definitely in it. It was so inspiring and moving and exactly what we would hope. And there’s a saying in impact investing that these projects work at the pace of trust. And so I don’t love to disagree with Adir, but it wasn’t difficult. Yes, it was frustrating at times, and it took a long time, and we had a lot of back and forth. But when I think back again to my urban planning background and working with communities and how neighbors act and NIMBYism, not in my backyard, we didn’t get that much pushback. People were on board and they were excited about it. And of course, there are a couple of residents that are hesitant to be letting strangers wander around and invade their quiet because that’s why they move to a kibbutz. But the overall sentiment is they understand that they need this and they need it for their future, and it’s something that they had wanted, and this is the moment to do it. And they feel lucky that this project is coming to them at this time and in this way, because we’ve worked really hard to be very deferential to making it culturally appropriate, weighing in what people are interested in.We could have done, we’re doing it boutique, but we could have made it much bigger and more down market. And there’s lots of things that we could be doing to shortcut it that we’re not doing because we want this hotel to be on Nir Am forever. And in 50 years from now, we want them running the hotel because it’s a phenomenal sustainable source of revenue for them. So I feel privileged that they have opened us with such open arms.Adir Waldman One thing which maybe we should explain. We intend to lease the land from the kibbutz for 50 years, and we will pay for the construction of the hotel, and we will pay them rent for the next 50 years. And at the end of the 50 years, we will hand over this business to the kibbutz as a gift.So in 50 years, the three of us will get back on this podcast, and we will talk about the ceremony of handing the kibbutz over. I think one of the three of us has a much better shot of being around than the other two of us, but that’s neither here nor there. Sima, do you want to say a little bit more about the economic impact on the region at large, beyond the people who are going to actually work at the hotel and beyond Nir Am itself, getting the revenue from the land for the hotel? I know you guys have a lot of thoughts and a lot of data about what you understand the impact regionally to be. Say something about that, and then I want to ask you something about timeline and all of that thing.Simone Gross Sure. We think in the next 10 years, the hotel is going to generate over 170 million shekels of revenues for businesses. That’s outside of our project. We also expect to generate about 4 million shekels a year for the kibbutz itself. So the idea that we can have that impact, and that’s because we think we’re going to attract about 22,000 annual overnight stays That’s just a lot of bodies coming with a lot of interest in spending their disposable income and their leisure budget in the area. And on jobs, we hope to create 120 local jobs. Again, whether that’s Nir Am or Sderot or the local. We We are lucky, actually, with the proximity to Sderot, because from a labor market perspective, we probably aren’t going to be able to find everybody at Nir Am. But Sderot is also a urban environment that needs a workforce development, and so this is a perfect pairing. That’s general bits of it. On a less quantitative focus, we are really working on local supply chain as well. So we would hope to have the privilege of working with the furniture studio in Beeri and sourcing all of our furniture from local Israeli artisans.And like the art you talked about at the Anu Exhibit, we would love to showcase Otef artists throughout and use them in our décor. We want to source our food. We’re sure Eyal Shani is going to focus on that from a farm to tables perspective. All of that is going to contribute up the supply chain. That’s how we get to that 170 million shekel. That’s great. I also do want to acknowledge and be very grateful of the fact Tkuma is thinking about how to spur this hospitality development that hadn’t happened before October 7th.Explain what Tkuma is for people that don’t know.Simone Gross Sure. They’re the agency that is working on rebuilding the Otef, and they’ve already allocated a lot, billions of shekel to rebuilding in different sectors and industries. And so the Ministry of Tourism has a subsidy program to incentivize hotel development outside of the center of Israel, so outside of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But Tkuma realizes they need to supplement that. So they’ve been a really generous and gracious partner in thinking about what else and how to layer on top of that incentive to make it a deeper incentive and a larger reimbursement for hotels that come online. And so we really hope to be the first to partake in that program as well. And that’s an ongoing discussion. But it’s just a general spirit of collaboration and partnership that we’ve had with everybody in the Otef to a dear point earlier, that everyone in the region knows that hospitality is a piece of this puzzle. We can’t just, what I was hearing a lot after October 7th was, Oh, we’re going to put a high tech hub and we’re going to commute people back to Tel Aviv. That can’t be the only answer, even the main answer. We need to be thinking about all that creative class and culture growth that we can do so that someone like Roi Azizi can be successful in their endeavors. And it just, I think, speaks to this as, I haven’t met him yet, but I’m actually meeting with him in a couple of days. He reached out. He had heard about the project.He was in New York this week. Simone Gross Exactly. That keeps happening. It’s been wonderful partners that we’ve met, whether it’s the folks that are trying to grow the spirit in wine the wine industry in the Negev, or if it’s people are working on workforce development and know that we’re going to have jobs that need to be filled, or again, about the supply chain stuff. It’s really amazing to see all of that happening so organically. I I think big piece of Adir’s special sauce is he knows how to assemble the best in each area. And so he just keeps drawing amazing people from each area to join our team. And so that’s going to help spur all that regional development right away.Adir Waldman We’ve been blessed. I do want to, sorry, Daniel. On Sima’s point, I just want to say we’ve been blessed at the number of people who, instead of saying, your idea is insane, have said, Wait a minute, I’m rolling up my sleeves. Let me see how I can help you. There are two people in particular that deserve credit, and I just want to say their names because they’ve been incredible. One is David Zisser. He’s a hotel entrepreneur who lives in London and builds very nice hotels across Europe. The other is a person named Shai Zelerin. He’s an Israeli who moved away to New York 30 years ago, and he heads hotels at Brookfield, which is the institution that owns probably more hotels than any other institution in the world. And they are big believers, along with a lot of other people that are on our advisory board, in the power of hospitality. You talk to them, this is their career, and they talk about the magic spark that can happen when a person, probably most of the listeners have had this experience, you go to a well-executed hotel in a special place. And it’s hard to explain, but suddenly you feel some emotional connection to that place. Our hope is we’re going to have thousands of people a year go home to their homes and dream about coming back to Israel for the purpose of going to Nir Am, for the purpose of going to the Otef. So that could change the future of this region’s growth prospects.It certainly could. You mentioned the governmental organization called Tkuma. The government just recently passed a law saying that the war is going to be known as the Milchemet Ha’Tkuma, the War of revival. That, I think, is a very far stretch. It’s not likely to happen. But this clearly is a time in Israel’s history, whether the government mandates it as a name or not, when the country really sees an opportunity to rebuild. Some of it related to the war, but some of it related to social divisions and issues that had come up before. I think many people, even though we are faced with many, many, many problems at the moment, see this as a moment really pregnant with tremendous opportunity for the country, socially, economically, strategically, militarily, diplomatically. We have a lot of work to do and so on and so forth. I want to ask you three quick questions by way of beginning to wrap up. Number one is we didn’t mention if the hotel yet has a name. Number two, something about the timeline here. When are people who are planning Pesach trips or weddings or bar mitzvahs or whatever? When should they start thinking about this? And the last thing is, if anybody’s listening, you mentioned something about investors before, but if anybody’s listening who has an interest for whatever reason and getting involved in an investment, are you open to that? And we’ll put links for addresses and stuff if you are in the notes for today. So name, timeline, and investors.Adir Waldman Sima.Simone Gross Okay, so we don’t have a name yet, and I can already anticipate Adir’s groan, but one of the images that I give to people when I talk about this is the Japanese concept of kintsugi, which is that golden joinery when you break something. And so to me, our project is like the golden scar of the Otef, and it’s going to help seam it back together and make it stronger. And so that’s where my head always goes when we think about names, but we haven’t done that yet.The person who picks the final name gets a free two-night stay or something like that?Simone Gross Exactly. Or our anchor investor gets to pick the name. Be the first one in and help us pick our name.Timeline?Adir Waldman Tomorrow.Simone Gross Exactly. When I first joined the project, I was hoping we’d be open by April 28 for my son’s bar mitzvah. I would love to make Pesach there. My whole extended family knows that. And so that is still a real goal for me. Realistically, I think it might be more like 2029. Big piece of this will be now that things are quieter. That was a big question mark on timeline. It’s how quickly we can fundraise and get through permitting.So this is basically within four years, you see this hotel being open.Adir Waldman We’ve done a tremendous amount of work in the last two years. We’ve been waiting for the moment that happened a week ago, where suddenly the skies begin to clear, and we can actually say to people, Hey, we talked to you about this. Can we have a commitment? And now we’re ready. We’re off to the races.So that leads us right to this. If there are people who are listening who are asking themselves, just as the two of you were, what can I do to help move Israel forward? What can I do to help the healing? And they in their own particular position to be investors in a project like this, you’re open to those kinds of investors?Simone Gross Totally. But we’re also, it’s much broader than that because we’re also open to equity and loans from federations, foundations, concessionary capital from donor and visor funds. There’s a lot of different ways to come into this project. And of the investors that we already have some commitments from, they’re all coming in in different shapes and sizes. So it’s really back to that amazing collaboration that’s happening both internally in Israel and in the US. We’re seeing all stripes. And Adir and I have a little friendly rivalry about who’s going to bring more in from their backyard.Well, I’ll just say this by way of wrapping. I think that this The last two years have changed so much. A lot of it for the worse, but a lot of it for the better. One of the things that we’ve seen between Israel and diaspora communities was a tremendous outpouring of first grief and then support from the diaspora. Every single time I went down to the Otef to avocados to pick avocados, to pick whatever, and discover muscles that I didn’t know were in my body because they ached the next day. There were always tons and tons of people from outside of the country who come, including, by the way, non Jews from Germany who’d come by bus loads. It was really very, very inspiring. There was also a bit of a breakdown, as many Americans just particularly felt very alienated by some of Israel’s policies and some of Israel’s conduct of the war. Who’s right and who’s wrong is irrelevant at this moment, but we do know that the relationship was really tested in a way that was sad for many of us. I think a project like this, whether a person is simply involved with their federation or whether a person is a philanthropist themselves, whether a person is an investor or a person will just eventually come and become part of this because they’re going to go to it, is opportunity not only for building the Otef, but it’s building that relationship as well. Israeli business people are going to be involved in this. Diaspora people are going to be involved in this. It’s one of those many, many, many projects that are going to start sprouting up around Israel, which is an opportunity for the world Jewish community and beyond the world Jewish community to get together and help to rebuild, which is exactly what Tkuma means. So it’s very, very exciting. I have to say when Adir, who I know, again, from our previous conversation about his correct work, when he reached out and told me about it, I immediately asked if you guys would come on because I think it’s just a project, certainly I had never heard of it, and I’ve never heard of it. I’m assuming the vast majority of people listening to us today have not heard of it. It’s super important and super inspiring. It’s important for people to know about it, but it’s inspiring at this particular moment in Jewish history for people to think not only about what was destroyed, but about what’s being built. So Adir Waldman and Simone Gross, thank you both very, very much for taking time out of what I know are crazy busy schedules on relatively short notice to get together. And I look forward to the day when the three of us can have a glass of wine at the hotel, whatever its name will be.Adir Waldman Amen. Amen. Thank you.Simone Gross Exactly. Thank you. And you’ll record your next podcast there.Very good. That’ll be great. Anyway, we look forward to continuing the conversation. Wish you a lot of luck and success in moving this forward.Simone Gross Thank you so much.

The Haredim have decided on a massive show of force (in numbers) as a way of reminding the powers that be that they should not be trifled with. The impact on traffic everywhere hear the capital is the subject of newspaper articles across Israel’s press today.

I may be naive, but I find it very hard to believe that even religious non-Haredi Israelis, who lost sons and fathers and brothers at horrifying rates in this war, will swallow the pill that Netanyahu apparently thinks he can sweeten. Many people speak of a new coalition of former rivals, encompassing “those who served.” Ie, “let’s first get us all together and resolve this Haredi non-service abomination, and then we can deal with the differences between us.”

There was a period not that long ago when that was considered likely. One hears less about it now. Then again, elections haven’t been called, so it remains to be seen how this will play out politically.

In the meantime, the idea of a huge anti-military-service rally is so startling (to some) or obscene (to others) that the issue is all over social media. The press itself can’t really convey the depth to which this is roiling Israel.

For that, we need peeks into social media to get a sense of the national mood.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Guy Moran, a very popular and talented political cartoonist, posted this drawing on his Instagram page. It shows the multitudes of Haredim making their way to the protest, walking by a street pole that is adorned (and most of them still are across Israel) with the stickers have have the faces of those who fell.

Their signs, which they’re holding as they walk by the stickers, say “We’d rather die than serve.”

The bitter irony isn’t exactly subtle.

Neither is the irony of this actual video of the Jerusalem train station this morning, with all the Haredim coming to the city while the soldiers are heading down to the trains to head to their bases.

I first missed this when I saw the video, but a friend pointed out to me that one of the soldiers in the foreground is a son of Rabbi Avi Goldberg, a revered teacher at a Jerusalem school and father of eight who was killed in the war. His son is now serving as the Haredim ascend to the street to hold signs that say (as in the drawing above) “We’d rather die than serve.”

Some people are dying. Just not them.

I’m hardly the only one who wonders if this public stunt isn’t going to backfire on the Haredim and on the government that is trying to shield them from the obligation to share in the burden of defending this country. Assaf Sagiv, one of Israel’s leading conservative public intellectuals, whom we’ve quoted often before, posted this earlier today (Google translated here):

All of which brings us to the video at the very top of this post, which I saw on a dozen WhatsApp accounts earlier today. It shows the Haredim flooding the Jerusalem train station (always identifiable by its very distinctive escalators—the train platforms are very, very far underground because the maximum grade that a train can climb is insufficient to get to the surface of high-up Jerusalem), as a soldier, likely on his way to his base, is playing the piano.

There are grand pianos at many of the train stations in Israel. I don’t know the origin of that, but it’s cool. People—many of them very talented—are always playing them. The pianos are all covered with those stickers of fallen soldiers … If you look carefully at the top, you’ll see a row of stickers just above the keyboard, facing the pianist.

He’s playing whatever he’s playing, but then realizes that the Haredim descending on the escalator are singing something different. So he waits a moment, figures out what they’re singing, and then plays along.

The whole thing drips with irony. The words of the song they’re singing are from Isaiah 8:10, and read as follows:

The tune of “עוצו עצה ותפר” (Utzu Etza) is generally traced to the Hasidic Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. It reflects the musical heritage of Ashkenazi Hasidic traditions, which originated in regions such as Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. These communities developed distinctive nigunim (wordless melodies or melodies with spiritual texts) that were used in prayer and communal singing, often to bolster their spirits or calm their souls.

As far as I was able to learn, there is no singular small town or exact village attributed to the melody, but it is well rooted in the Hasidic tradition from the general region of Eastern European Jewry. Over time, this melody became part of the Israeli and global Jewish musical repertoire, popularized and preserved by yeshiva students and Musar/Chassidic groups, particularly those connected to Chabad and Slonim Hasidic sects.

So what’s the irony? In Eastern Europe, the words (which made their way out of Isaiah and into the liturgy, and which in traditional prayerbooks are found immediately after the Aleinu prayer) were sung as a way of strengthening resolve when the Gentile authorities had issued some rule or proclamation designed to make life miserable for the Jewish community. What did these Jews assure themselves, quoting Isaiah? “You can hatch a plot against us, but it will be foiled, for God is with us.”

To whom are those words addressed today? Not to the Gentile authorities, but to Israelis. To the government. To the families of the soldiers who fell by the hundreds. To the families of the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers, in body and soul, who will never again be whole. To the actual soldiers in the train station on their way to defend the country.

And what about the soldier in uniform playing the piano. Does he not get it? I’m sure he did.

So why’s he playing?

Because that’s how Jews are. That’s what Jews do. When some sing, everyone joins. That’s who we are as a people. Your song is my song.

At least when it comes to melodies. When it comes to defending the country, not so much.

Where’s this headed? We’re likely to find out much sooner than we might think.

That’s the Jerusalem of old, stuck in the middle of a trendy, much modernized neighborhood. Baka, as the neighborhood is known, was originally home to big villas owned by wealthy Arabs in the region … the cool Jerusalem air was a reprieve from the hot environs of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan or elsewhere, so wealthy Arabs in the early part of the century built gorgeous homes all around here. Gorgeous and huge.

So huge, in fact, that when those people fled the fighting in 1948 and never returned (they wouldn’t have been allowed to even if they wanted to, which they likely didn’t), a young Israel that didn’t have what to do with the thousands and thousands of immigrants pouring into the new country stuffed multiple families into these formerly single family homes. Dividers were built, more people than ideal shared cramped spaces. Quickly, a once elegant neighborhood of wealthy Arabs became a bit of a slum for Jews from Arab lands.

When I was a kid and we lived here for a couple of years, we were allowed to ride our bikes anywhere wanted—except Baka. Our parents told us that if we rode there, we’d come home without our bikes. But the time my wife and I moved with our family to Israel (and to that very Baka neighborhood) some thirty years later, Baka was no longer a slum. It was quickly on the rise and much desired.

Places like that falafel just up the block from us, clearly a throwback to Baka’s early days, have seen it all. But you live some place long enough and you stop asking questions about it. Why was Falafel Oved called that? Never once asked myself.

It turns out, the place was owned more than half a century ago by an elderly guy named Ovadiah. He, too, was an immigrant, as was Judy Lev, who lived in this neighborhood and in a charming and compelling book about twelve of the colorful personalities that once made up this neighborhood (including Ovadiah the falafel guy), tells a story not only of stores and streets and a community, but Israel and a way of life.

I saw down to chat with Judy about her book, just released this week, Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile and we’re sharing it with you today as part of an informal series on Israeli authors who’ve written books in English that we think capture something unique and special about Israeli life.

Judy Lev was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and made Aliyah in 1967. From 1984 to 2004 she wrote columns for both The Jerusalem Post and The Cleveland Jewish News. She also writes fiction and teaches both creative nonfiction and fiction to adults, and mentors Anglo Israeli writers. Since October 14, 2023, Judy Lev has been writing Epistles from Israel, now on Substack. Our Names Do Not Appear, a memoir about the legacy of silenced childhood grief, was Lev’s first book. Bethlehem Road: stories of immigration and exile is her second book.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

Here in Jerusalem, just a few weeks ago, we were running our air conditioners not only during the day, but some evenings and nights as well. It was still hot. Now, though, just a couple of weeks later, it’s gorgeous outside in Jerusalem during the day, and the nights are crisp, even a bit chilly. To many of us, the fresh air feels like a new beginning. In many ways, it’s not only the the beginning of a new season, but it feels like the beginning of a new period in Israel’s history. We’ve all taken a deep sigh of relief with the return to Israel of the 20 living hostages, and while we still pray for those who are not living to be returned as quickly as possible, there’s no question that people here are breathing easier. The war may not be fully behind us, but still, it’s become a bit easier also to look around and to be reminded of the charms of life here in Israel, whether in Jerusalem, where I happen to live, or elsewhere. So today we’re starting a series of conversations with Israeli authors who’ve written in books in English that our entire audience could appreciate, that somehow shed light on dimensions of life here in ways that may not often get discussed.We begin today with Judy Lev, who has lived in Israel since 1967, and who has written two books, the second of which we’re going to discuss today. Her second book is called Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration Exile, and it’s just now come out. I really enjoyed the book for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it’s about the very neighborhood that I’ve called home for 25 years. So I learned a lot about the stores that I frequent and the places that I see and the history that’s behind them that I didn’t know. But I also really appreciated the fact that Judy pointed in a very subtle and powerful way to the fact that all of us who are immigrants have also been exiled in a way. Stories of immigration are also stories of exile, as she notes. And I think she captures something very powerful about Israeli society in general when pointing to that, because, of course, so many Israelis, either this generation or the previous one, were immigrants. It turns out that our neighborhood’s charms began long before we got here. And Judy points to them by bringing to life the struggles of 12 immigrants searching for meaning and happiness on what is now one of Jerusalem’s vibrant thoroughfares.As I mentioned, the book is just out, and we are attaching an Amazon link for those who’d like to explore it further. And we hope you’ll enjoy this conversation with Judy Lev about her new book, Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile

It’s a story of a neighborhood, which happens to be the neighborhood that I live in. Every building that you talk about, every street corner, every store, I know all those places. There was something very charming about reading a really beautifully written book in many different people’s voices, a kaleidoscope or one of those quilts, patchwork quilt, where each one is somebody else. I loved reading about my own neighborhood, which is really fun. But I think there’s something else that’s really profound about this book, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today. You call it in the subtitle, Stories of Immigration and Exile. And Baka is, as I’m sure you’re going to tell us very shortly, very much a neighborhood of immigrants, different kinds of immigrants at different stages. And we’ll get to that when we talk about the first of the stories that we’re going to talk about. But because it’s a neighborhood of immigrants, it’s also a neighborhood of exile. Because, first of all, there were people who were here before we got there, and we’ll talk about them a little bit. But all of us who chose to come here also chose to be in exile. In other words, we were American, you and I, originally, but there’s a lot of French people in Baka, and there’s people from all over. And by virtue of their having made a decision to live in Israel and to live in Jerusalem, they also made a decision not to be where they grew up. And that’s something that you don’t ever quite completely shake. You and I were both saying to each other a different point that our grandmothers who came from the quote, unquote, Old country, seemed to us like immigrants, and our parents were completely situated in America, born in America, spoke English, mellifluously, felt totally comfortable in America as America’s apple pie. And then here we are, once again, repeating our grandparents’ story, just instead of moving to America, moving out of America, and being immigrants, really, until our last days. And so there’s something, if the first book struck me because of its focus on Israel and memory, today, I think we should talk about Immigration and Exile.That’s a very long-winded way of saying. I’m thrilled that you’re back. I love your second book really very much. It’s just like I loved the first. Tell us a little bit, and we’ll put your whole bio in the notes for today so people can read all of that. Tell us why you wrote this book.Okay. Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for inviting me again. It’s lovely to be here back in the hood. Why I wrote the Book. So I lived in Baka for more than almost 40 years. And then when I left Jerusalem in 2005, I moved far away to Mosha Bait Zait, which is all of a half a kilometer from the city limits of Jerusalem. But I felt like I was in Galut. Exile. I felt like I was in exile, even though I was a half a kilometer away.Well, Bait Zait is very different from Baka.Yeah, right. It’s a beautiful suburb. It started off as a Moshav. It’s still a Moshav, theoretically. No, it was lovely. It’s the dream of a lot of people to have their own home and a large garden and mountains, surrounded by mountains and lots of trees and all kinds of critters. And indeed, it was lovely. But I miss the city. And my way of coping, pretty much with any strong feeling, is through writing. That’s my coping mechanism. Just like I started the epistles from Israel, four days after this war started that we’re currently still in. And so I started writing stories that take place on Derech Beit Lechem on Bethlehem Road, the main artery of the neighborhood of Baka, which is located in South Jerusalem.A little bit of history of Baka, give us, please.Yes. So the French built a railroad from the town of the seaport town of Jaffa to Jerusalem in the late 1800s. It was completed in 1898. And at that point, there were well-to-do Arab families, both in Bethlehem and in the old city of Jerusalem, who wanted to create a garden suburb, the Arab version of what Talpyot was, a garden suburb. And so during the Ottoman Empire, they built the first few homes, mainly along the train track, because the train track opened up Jerusalem to the rest of the world. Then after the British came, then in the ‘20s and the ‘30s, there was really a lot of building, and they built beautiful homes out of the local- They built enormous homes. We should make everybody I understand. Something like there were two and three-story homes, ornate with arches. I mean, these are not little houses. No. These are ornate homes. These were wealthy Arabs. They built gorgeous homes.Well-to-do Arabs, Christian Muslim and Armenians. It was an exclusive neighborhood in that everyone had a large garden area, and they planted pomegranate trees and fig trees, and And they had vegetable gardens. And they also built buildings for apartments. And there were tennis courts in the neighborhood. I’m not sure exactly where. And it was a strictly Arab neighborhood until 1947, ‘48. More than 99 %, probably 99 99% of the population were either forced to leave by the haganah, by Israeli soldiers, or they were told to leave by the leaders of Jordan who said, Get out now and for two or three weeks, we’ll finish off the Jews, and then you can go back to your beautiful homes. So they got out, and we on the war.And they never got back in.And they never got back in.And what did Israel do with these huge houses?So immediately, they displaced persons from the old city, Jews from the old city of Jerusalem, who had been defeated during the war, so they couldn’t live in the old city anymore. So they were placed in homes in Baka. And then in ‘49, ‘50, ‘51, the Jewish agency housed refugees from DP camps and from people who had been living in the tent camps, the Maabarot in Talpiyot, and they placed the families in these homes. So in a gorgeous home where maybe one family lived or an Arab family, and the son maybe had the second floor, the Jewish agency would place maybe four families. So you had people from DP camps in Europe, from Yugoslavia, from Romania, And you had Moroccans who were in the 10 cities in the Maabarot, Moroccans and people from Kurdistan and Libya and Tunisia. And you had a really potpourri of populations all living together in these gorgeous homes.Which were not so gorgeous anymore inside, because when you take a single family home and you put four or five families in it, then the neighborhood changes dramatically.And then in the early ‘50s, the government started building these shikunim, public housing.Soviet-style apartment buildings that were just rectangular, ugly, whatever.And they built schools in the neighborhood, and It was a completely immigrant neighborhood, except for the few Armenian families who still live in the neighborhood.Now, you moved into the neighborhood in the late ‘60s, right?Yeah, I lived in one of the oldest Arab homes that no longer exists. In ‘69, I lived there for a year.Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about what Baka was like back then, because as I mentioned to you in a previous conversation that we had, my family made an abortive attempt at Aliyah. My parents made Aliyah in ‘69, and we lived on Rechow Ben Zakai, which you actually mentioned in your book. I think the taxi is going down Rechow Ben Zakai or something like that. But I don’t know, it’s a 15-minute walk from Baka. It’s nothing. And we had bikes, and we were told by my parents, all three boys, you can ride around wherever you want. There’s only one neighborhood in Jerusalem you may not ride in, and that is Baka, because they said, if you ride into Baka, you’re coming home without your bike, in the best of circumstances. Tell us what was going on in Baka. I think you mentioned it on the corners of Yehuda and Levi with Derech Bet Lechem or Bethlehem Road. What’s going on in Baka back in those days? Why did my parents not let us ride bikes?Well, apparently, there were street gangs. I wasn’t so much aware of the street gangs, but it was a very neglected neighborhood. When my husband and I moved into a home in ‘72, there were drug addicts sitting in the entrance hall of the building. There was no electricity to get to the third floor where we lived.Not all the streets were paved, by the way.Not all the streets were paved at all. There was a bus or two busses that went back and forth on the street. But it was, some people, from Rehavia would call it a slum, perhaps, but it had a lot of charm. I mean, the architecture was just still-The architecture had more charm than some of the people, perhaps.Exactly. And the choices were, we could have bought an apartment in the newly built neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol in the northern part of the city for the same price, or no, for maybe even more expensive. But I don’t know, I fell in love with the apartment that we bought, mainly because it had an 80 square meter attached roof from which you could see the whole city to the west, and the and the sky because the buildings were all low. So you could see all of the Judean Hills, the hills surrounding Jerusalem, and its sunset and at dawn. And it was just so poetically gorgeous. I didn’t care if there were gangs, and I didn’t have children at that time, so I didn’t really care if the school was a lousy school. We had some wonderful neighbors in the building where we lived, people who had, our downstairs neighbors, especially, they had fought in the war of Independence, and the father of these three children had lost an eye.He’s in the book.Yeah. They were just wonderful people.Let’s fast forward a little bit. It’s a rough and tumble neighborhood in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. But because it’s cheap, it’s a place where if you’re a a beatnik American and you want to come to Israel and you want to find a place where you can rent or whatever, this was a great place to go because it was Jerusalem, but it was cheap. And a lot of the beginning of the gentrification of Baka, from what I understand, started with these Americans who are more your hippy dippy types, who moved in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. And over the course of time, of course, the neighborhood gets prohibitively expensive. Just for example, you know the streets very well. On the corner of Reuben and Gidon, which is literally around the corner from the building that you and I met in the first time. So it’s where the park is, a ravine going up and down. On the corner, though, they’re refurbishing an old building. One One apartment is $8 million dollars, not shekel, $8 million dollars. We’re talking about a neighborhood now that’s exploded in terms of crazy price, but it’s still got a lot of the color that it had back then.I remember when we had a block party years ago, our downstairs neighbor organized a block party. We lived in the building for, I don’t know, 15 years. Everybody recognized everybody from parking their cars on the street, but nobody knew anybody. They put out flyers in all the buildings for people to come and have like potato chips and Coke and whatever. A lot of heel came was very sweet. That That was when I learned, by the way, that not all of the streets had been paved. It never occurred to me that. Of course, the streets were always paved, but they weren’t because the old people from the neighborhood, mostly Moroccans, were arguing about, did they get paved in ‘73 or did they get paved in ‘74? When did they change the names from the Arab names to the names of the 12 tribes? Then they made a joke, which was, Me Marokaim le Amerikaim. The neighborhood went being from Moroccan to American. It wasn’t all Moroccan, and not all American, but their point was that the gentrification really changed the neighborhood dramatically. It’s still very colorful, though, and a lot of things that you talk about in the book are still there.I want to dive into some of the issues that you raised, not so much about the neighborhood, but about Israel and exile and so forth. There’s, I don’t know, how many stories are in the book? I don’t remember anymore. Twelve stories. Twelve stories. They’re great. Each one is in a different person’s voice, and they’re written beautifully. It’s just no way to capture the beauty of these stories without us reading them out loud, which we’re not going to do because people can get the book if they want. But I want to talk about three little comments that get made in the book, which I think touch on this whole idea of immigration and exile, and what they say, not only about Baka, obviously, but what they say about Israel in general. Because this is a book about Israel. It’s about Baka, but it’s really a lens onto Israel. I want to start with a story that you call the law of Return. The law of Return, as I’m sure most of our listeners know, was a law passed in the summer of 1950, which basically says that anybody with one Jewish grandparent, which was the same definition of Jewishness that the Nazis had used. So this was a way of getting back. If you were Jewish enough for the Nazis to kill you, you’re Jewish enough for the Israeli state to accept you as a citizen, any Jew could automatically become a citizen and come here. Other people, like in most countries, you have to apply to become a citizen. But if you’re a Jew, that right just is given to you if you have one Jewish grandparent. And that, of course, has created all sorts of issues because lots of Soviet Jews have come with one Jewish grandparent, but it’s perhaps, let me be on the paternal side. So they’re halakhically not Jewish. There is for the Ministry of the Interior, they are Jewish. It’s all to do. We’re not going to go there.Who is a Jew?Right. That’s a whole other can of worms. In this story called The Law of Return, though, you tell It’s a story that a lot of people have experienced, which is that they’re in this old Arab house, somebody knocks on the door.Yeah.Take it from there.Yeah. And this story takes place on the anniversary of the Sixth Day War. And there’s a young woman from London who’s buying an apartment on Bethlehem Road, and she wants to see the apartment after the people who lived there before had left. And she was dancing around the apartment, and it had beautiful tile floors.Which they still do a lot of them.Right. And the windows were gorgeous, and there were these two tall palm trees in front of it. And then there’s a knock on the door. And it turns out it was the son of the of the original owner of the building.He’d actually built the building.He was a builder. He was the owner, and he and his family lived there not for a very long, well, no, they lived there. They could have lived there. I’m not sure what year it was built in, but they could have lived there for 20 or For sure. Right. He wanted to see this man, who was the owner’s son, wanted to see his apartment, his house. He had been trying to see it for years since 1967, and the previous owners did not let them in. Now, this actually happened in many homes in Baka.Lots of them.So This new immigrant from London, she let the man in. And then he tells her the story of what happened the night when they left and what a trauma it was for them and has been for them, even though they’re resettled in Ramallah. And the woman, the 27-year-old woman who’s buying the apartment is not traumatized, but shaken. She’s shaken.Because it’s traumatizing, I think. It really is.She didn’t know what she was getting into when she bought this apartment that she’s buying into this whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Right. Just buying an apartment puts you in that conflict. Exactly. And there’s a really, for me, a very profound line which you have when she wants to go. First of all, she wants to go because she’s very uncomfortable with him being, it doesn’t sound like she’s scared for her safety. She’s just very uncomfortable with him, and the whole story is so uncomfortable. And she also has a meeting with the lawyer to finish the sale of the apartment. So she really does have to go because she’s got a meeting. And then she says, I’m really sorry. I said, again, Would you mind leaving? I have to get to the lawyer’s. And he says, Sure. My family’s used to being kicked out by Jews. And it’s a stab in the heart. Because at the heart of that little story in the apartment is, of course, the story that we’re still living right now. I’m in the news on whatever the news was today on the front page. It’s about the same conflict. Whose home is this? Who gets to be here? Who doesn’t get to be here? Who did what to whom? Competing narratives about that.I thought that this whole idea of who’s in exile here. She’s an immigrant, but she’s in exile because she came from some other place. He’s in exile because he had a house that was taken away. There’s nobody who’s situated where they started. There’s nobody in the story who, his father’s already gone, but his father didn’t die where he had built this house. Everybody someplace else from where they had been born. That struck me as being very instructive about this country and the neighborhood in general. By the way, I have friends who lived on Rechow Yehuda, which is literally it intersects the the street that you’re talking about. Exact same thing. A guy knocked on the door. They were very hesitant to let him in, but they’re good people. If a guy says that, you don’t want to be a jerk, but he could tell they were very nervous. I said, Look, I’ll describe for you. He remembered the apartment. I’ll describe for you the layout. I remember it as a boy. When he said, There’s a window here, and then there’s a kitchen. It was so clear they knew the apartment. She let him in, and he looked around, and he didn’t take pictures. He didn’t say anything. He just walked around very quietly, and then he left. But she also was not an unpleasant interaction, but she was so shaken. I heard about it a couple of weeks after it happened, that she was still visibly shaken by that. Because, again, every house has a story. Every stone has a story.And it’s easy to deny it and not, you mentioned to me about a young woman who didn’t know that it had been an Arab neighborhood. I mean, it It was a completely 100% Arab neighborhood.Well, Baka is an Arab word. Baka is an Arab word that means valley, like Bicah in Hebrew, but it means valley because it’s lower than other parts of Jerusalem. All right, let’s move from Baka or old houses in Baka I want to mention Paris very quickly because there’s a line in the book in a different story where people are talking about this couple, one of whom has come from Paris or both of whom have come from Paris. I don’t know.Both were in Paris at the same time. I mean, both Annie and Ted.Then somebody says about them, They’ll always have Paris, which also is a very interesting issue that all of us immigrants here face. Which is, at what point are you really Israeli? I had a boss who was really a mentor and a teacher, Professor Seymour Fox, of blessed memory. When I worked at the Mandel Foundation, he made Ali on ‘67. His three boys were all raised here. They all went to the army. He told me that, I don’t know, in the ‘90s or something, he was on some panel at Hebrew University, and the woman who was putting the panel together said, Yeah, we have you and we have so and so, but I really want to get an Israeli also. He said to her, I’ve been here for, I don’t know what it was, 30 years, 40 years. All my boys went to the army. They were all raised here. At what point do I actually become Israeli? She didn’t say anything, but the answer was, of course, never. I mean, the way my grandmother also living in Borough Park, her English was very good, but if she was tired, she slipped into Yiddish, and her English was fine, but it did have that little bit of an accent. At what point, if you would ask her or ask someone about her, are you going to be really authentically as American as Apple pie and Chevrolet? The answer is never. And when you’re you and I, Judy and Danny, are you going to be really completely authentically Israeli? We’re not. When our kids are going to deal with that, however they deal with it, and what we do understand, and what we don’t understand, and what nuances we pick up when we don’t, why did you think it was an important I would think to put that line in about that they’ll always have Paris? What were you trying to say about immigration, exile, what it feels like to live here?Well, I once volunteered at the Beth Moses, which is a home for the agent here in Baka. It’s still there. Yeah, it’s still there. I did writing workshops with them. I was amazed when I heard this one woman who had been a principal. She came from Germany. She was a principal of a girls’ school in Haifa. And the memory that she shared with the group was how in 1934, ‘35, she was at home and she heard this parade outside, and her father closed the curtains because the father didn’t want her to see the parade. But she snuck, and she saw her friends from school marching with the Nazi youth down the street, and she felt like she wanted to be with them because they were her friends from school. And the father got so angry. And I don’t know, just hearing this story from her made me realize that this woman, she had contributed so much to Israel. Her Hebrew was exquisite, and she was a principal of a school. And yet one of the strongest memories that she had was being a young German girl who wanted to be with her German friends. And I don’t know, from that, I had the feeling that like, she’s also an immigrant. Like, oh, I’m an immigrant. I’m always going to be an immigrant because I’m always going to have this American background and this American accent when I speak Hebrew and my American education, and I don’t want to get rid of it. I mean, I love it.It’s part of who you are.Yeah, it’s who I am.Well, it’s replete in all the stories in the book. And I think that’s one of the things that makes the book so authentic. Even O’Vadia, the falafel salesman, right? O’vadia falafel is still there. I mean, O’Vadia for sure is not anymore because he’s already a pretty older guy when the story takes place decades and decades ago. But it never occurred to me in all the times that I’ve bought falafel at O’Vadia falafel, which over 25 years in the neighborhood is a lot of times because it’s really good. By the way, you actually explain in the book why there’s no schwarma there. I’ve always thought to myself, what an idiot doesn’t add schwarma to his falafel stand? The answer to that is in your book. But again, even O’Vadia was in his own way an immigrant. There’s nobody even, the old timers are in their own way immigrants.Totally. I remember also once when I was at Kibbutz Ginosar, there was an old man who was guarding the gate to the beach, and I sat and spoke with him, and he was thinking about his father’s shoe repair shop in Pinsk. And this was a man who had been the first fisherman on the Sea of Galilée for 2,000 years. What he had achieved, building this kibbutz, Ginosar, on the shores of the Galilée, And this is what he thought about when he was older, which is, I mean, it’s natural. I think older people, they think about their childhood. So this question of how authentic do they see you as being, right? How authentic do the quote, unquote, real Israelis see you as being? I won’t mention the name of the person in this case because I don’t have his permission to, but he’s also passed away, but I could ask his kids. But He told me he was a colleague of mine many years ago, a wonderful, wonderful man. And he told me that he made Alia sometime before the ‘67 war, I guess, just a couple of years. His parents were not keen on it. They were also immigrants from the old country. And here he was, the seeing America with all of its promise and going off to this God forsaken place. Israel in the mid ‘60s was the Wild West, so to speak. And they made him make a promise. And the promise was just promise us, you’ll never give up your American citizenship. And he made a promise. He said, okay, I can make that promise. Then there’s the period called the Hamtana, which you actually talk a little bit about in your book. I don’t know if you call it the Hamtana, but there’s this period where there’s shells being fired before the Six-Day War.I think it’s in the very first chapter.In May. In the very first chapter, the person goes running and they heard something. In ‘67. In ‘67, right. So everybody thinks that the war started suddenly with Israeli jets racing off and taking out the Egyptian Air Force. No way. It’s not exactly how it went down. We knew for a good 30 days that the war was going to happen. They just didn’t know that Israel was going to strike first. But they were shelling us, and the straits of Tehran were closed, and Israel was being embargoed. I mean, it was a whole to-do. And it’s getting very, very stressful in Israel. And he taught at one of the Israeli universities, and somebody said to him, Well, don’t worry. You have your American passport. And he told me that that night, it was a big deal to make an international call back then, he called his parents and he said, I have to break my promise to you. I have to be able to tell that man, No, I don’t. I’m in this as much as you are. And he actually went to the embassy and he de-Americanized himself, whatever that even means. But he was so traumatized by having broken his promise to his parents that he told me this story probably 40 or 50 years after that.It was quite powerful. But again, you shed light on this. You peel You peel layers of skin off the deep wound and expose it. I don’t know exactly where I’m from. I want to be from here, but I’m really from there. They think I’m really from someplace else. But it’s all very complicated And I think your stories, they shed light on it in a really, really beautiful way. I think that people who read the book will understand something about Israel that they’re not going to understand in any other way. Everybody Everybody here is from someplace else. A lot of people were born here, obviously, but then their parents were from someplace else or their grandparents. The number of people here whose great grandparents live in this country is minuscule, just minuscule. And it’s really a powerful thing. I want to turn our story back to the conflict, which is not all of this book, but it’s a theme throughout the book because it’s a part of Israeli life. There’s a scene, I actually think it’s on Rechov Ben Zakai, which I mentioned earlier. That’s the street that I used to live on when I was a kid. There’s been a terrorist bombing. The woman who’s telling the story of this particular chapter, and again, the chapters are all told in the first person by... No, that’s not true. Not at all. But a lot of them are told in the first person, of whoever’s story it is. The first person is not Judy. It’s whoever the character in that chapter is. She’s racing to Hadassah and Karem because her fiancé, they’re about to get married. Actually, they’re days away from their wedding. She doesn’t know, is he alive? Is he dead? She’s been called, you have to get to the hospital right away. And then she has this conversation with a taxi driver. Tell us about the conversation.Well, the news is on the radio, and she hears the news, and how many have been killed, and the taxi driver feels empathy for what’s gone on. And he says, Oh, it’s terrible, isn’t it? And she says, What do you care? Yeah.And what does he say to her?He asks her. He pulls over to the side, and he asks her to get out of the car because she’s belittled his humanity.And his sense of belonging. And the fact that his kids could have been on that bus, too. So he tells her to get out of the cab, and then what happens?And then she apologizes. She apologizes. And she explains that she’s been upset all day, and she’s a nervous wreck.If I remember correctly, and you remember it better because you wrote it, but I think he leans into the glove component or something like that, right? He gets her a tissue or something. Exactly.Thank you. Yes, he gives her a tissue. Right. And she keeps that tissue, and the tissue appears again and again in the story, later in the story.Yeah. Cabs are such a, they are a study in and of themselves. I remember when I used to work at the place that I worked at before I worked at Shalem, where I still work, we used to have to go around from place to place, and there would be a driver that would pick us up. One day, they told us that the driver, whoever he was, was not going to come. There’s going to be a new driver. I get in the car. He actually, believe it or not, picked me up on Rechow Ben Zakai, I still remember. He’s playing classical music in the taxi. It’s a little unusual. It’s not unheard of, but it’s not the norm. Israel has a great classical music station. He was playing it. That already won me over. I had never even met the guy at all, and he already won me over. There’s a picture of him. He’s in his 50s, I guess. There’s a picture of a beautiful young woman on the dashboard. What do you say? I don’t know. I was trying to make an idle chatter with him, and I said, What a gorgeous picture. He said, Yeah, that was my daughter. She was killed in, and then he told me what bombing she’d been been killed in. He remained the driver for the place that I was working for many, many years. He since passed away. Then his son also then worked with us. But there are bonds that happen in taxis, especially around some of these terror moments. In this case, it was the man whose daughter had been killed. In the case of your story, it was a completely innocent man who had done absolutely nothing wrong. But she tosses him in with all the bad guys, and he’s hurt. And she knows that he’s hurt. And the part of her that’s not insanely nervous about her fiancé feels badly that he’s hurt. So again, here’s why I wanted our listeners to know about your book, because it’s so different. Pick up the history of Israel or read I don’t know if there is one, a history of the Neighborhood of Baka. If there is one, I’ve never read it, and I don’t plan to, it would be boring. But this is a way of showing the kaleidoscope, all the shapes and colors changing all the time of a neighborhood.But that’s really about Israel. I think that part of the tragedy of our current situation is so complex, and it’s tragic on so many different levels. But all we think about now, Israel, Hostages, War, Gaza, genocide, not genocide, ostracism, not ostracism, embargo, no embargo, Bibi, no Bibi. That takes up 99 %.Hostages.Yeah, I said the hostages. That’s all we talk about. And your book is an opportunity for people to re-meet the Israel of Old. It’s not a perfect Israel. There’s a war, there’s a conflict, there’s terrorists, there’s good people, there’s bad people, there’s nice people, there’s some not nice people. But it’s The Israel of Old with its colorful tapestry. I don’t know if you set out to write these stories in order to show that, or maybe that was just your coping mechanism for leaving Baka. But you really did show that. I want to ask you the following question by way of beginning to wrap up. It’s being published by an American publisher, which is fascinating to me. They pick certain books to publish, and they turn down a lot of books, and they picked yours. They decided they wanted to go and publish your book. And I’m curious, what do you think spoke to them about the book? I don’t know if they’re Jewish or not Jewish. I have no idea whatsoever. But they’re not Israelis, and they’re not professional Jews. And it’s not the AJ, whatever press, American Jewish, whatever press. It’s not. It’s a press. It’s a press that puts out books of all different sorts. What about this book? What about a book called Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile? Spoke to them in 2023, ‘24, ‘25, whenever you started to work with them. Why do you think they wanted to publish this book?Well, this is all conjecture, because I don’t know for sure.You don’t care as long as they did, by the way. I mean, we’re all like that. We don’t care why they said yes, as long as they said yes.The press is She Writes Press. So it’s an independent, hybrid press, and they only publish women writers. I think one of the reasons they took it is because they want to, of course, they accepted it. I think they accepted it before... No, they accepted it after the war began. I don’t know. I think maybe they want to broaden their horizons and have a story that takes place outside of the United States. I mean, they do have authors. They’re putting out at the same time a memoir by a Japanese woman who’s an immigrant to America, and another woman is writing about the Holocaust. And I mean, they have Jewish authors. They’re not afraid of Jewish authors. I’m very fortunate in that sense. And I think they saw that it was well written.It’s very well written. That’s putting it mildly.I mean, I’m I’ve been working on these stories for 20 years, and I had a lot of people read them.What did you think it was going to be a book? How long ago? And what made you think, Oh, this isn’t a bunch of stories. This is going to be a book one day? What triggered that?When I was 60, I went back to college for an MA in English at Bar Ilan. At that time, then they had their Shaindy Rudoff Graduate program in creative writing. I was part of that program, and they offered poetry or fiction. I chose fiction. And in order to graduate, you had to come up with a thesis, which was 110 pages. And the thesis had to have a connecting theme, the stories. So once I heard this from our mentor, our teacher, Alan Hoffmann, it was just clear to me that I’m going to write about Bethlehem Road, that all the stories are going to take place on Bethlehem Road. It was clear because it was at the same time that I had left Jerusalem. And so I started writing these stories that all took place on Bethlehem Road. And I took some stories that I had written before that. I had one story that had been accepted to Kenyan review in 1991 or ‘92, I don’t remember. And so it was easy to put that story also, and it was the theme of exile and family violence and how that can lead in the echoes of the binding of Isaac. So it fit very nicely on Bethlehem Road.Yeah, it’s certainly a great spine, so to speak, for the various stories to hold together. The book, I guess if you buy it in person, comes with this incredibly charming map of the neighborhood of Baka with all the streets, and then it’s got numbered there where each thing takes place. And if you know Baka, you actually recognize little drawings of the buildings, which are really beautifully done. Some people will buy it online, I guess, and maybe the map doesn’t come with those books. I don’t have any idea. But for people that buy it online, people that buy it in person, people that buy it in, is it going to be on Kindle also? I don’t know if they do that anymore.It’s an e-book. I don’t know.Okay, so there is an e-book. Okay. What do you want people to walk away with? I mean, aside from the fact that these are really beautiful stories and the characters are rich and it is beautifully written, is there something about Israel that you would hope that Jewish readers, non-Jewish readers, would put the book down, back on the table, sip their coffee? What do you hope is going through their hearts and their souls when they finish the book?I never really thought about that. But now that you’re asking the question, I think I would say that I want them to realize what a rich place this is and how layered it is and how complex it is and how deep it is and how it has a history. I mean, all these streets are all from the Bible or from the Mishneic period, and people live surrounded by this history. It’s a very different place than anywhere in the United States, for instance, which is really a new place compared to this place. And I want them to be open to I’d love for people to come visit because of it. And I know this is a terrible It’s a terrible time to visit, but I hope times will change and get better.It’s a hard time to visit. It’s a hard time to live here. And for those of us who are immigrants, it’s, I think, a complicated time because we, theoretically, do have an option to go somewhere else. I have a very good friend who wrote a piece on Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day, Two years ago in Times of Israel. He’s American. His kids are all born here. And he wrote a piece about, How will I know when it’s time to leave? And he told me he got a tremendous amount of heat because a lot of his Israeli friends said, What about those of us who don’t have that option? Did ever occur to you that you’re thinking in terms that real Israeli is, quote, unquote, real? Don’t really get to think about. And he felt bad. He felt badly that he hadn’t thought about that. He’s an incredibly extraordinary, wonderful person. But he just said, I never thought about it from that lens. And so even the tough times, you’re right, it’s not exactly a pinnacle of tourism in Israel right now. But even these tough times are a way of all of us asking ourselves, Where do we belong? And where am I at home? And where am I at home? I think American Jews, who are a lot of the people who are going to be listening to this conversation, are unfortunately asking themselves that question in a way that we haven’t asked it in America for a couple of generations. What’s this place going to be like for my children and for my grandchildren? Is this a temporary blip or is this a new trend? Where do we belong? Where’s home? Where are we immigrants? Where are we in exile? Where are we completely part of the fabric of the place? They are complicated questions. I know it’s just stories about people along the road, but that’s doing it a great disservice. It’s really a book about the richness, as you said, the richness of the fabric that makes up Israel. Also just fabulous stories and windows into Israeli life. Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile by Judy Lev. Thank you so much, and good luck with the book.Thank you so much for having me.

And …. having no idea what was happening in the “real” world (though their world was all too real). A few had literally no exposure to news since they were kidnapped on October 7. And now, they’re home. Were they to sit with one of us and say, “Tell me what happened,” what would we say? We know where we’d start, but how much do we really remember?

That’s soon going to be more than a hypothetical issue, because contemporary men and women have short memories. In a few short years, our children or our grandchildren, too young to ask now, will ask us to tell them the story. How much of these agonizing 738 days are we really going to remember?

Professor Monty Penkower, a highly regarded historian of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, Jew-hatred and Zionism, has prepared for this moment from the very beginning of the war, and in a series of volumes — which he can thankfully now end — has written a detailed account of the war we have just lived through.

With the Sukkot holiday behind us and the holiday season now completed, we resume our weekly Israel from the Inside podcast, with the full conversation as well as a transcript prepared for our paid subscribers. We renew our conversations today with Professor Penkower about the first volume of the history of this war.

Professor Monty Noam Penkower, is a professor emeritus of Jewish history at the Machon Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, and was one of four recipients of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Asia (ASMEA) 2023 Bernard Lewis book prize for his book “After the Holocaust”.

He is the former Victor J. Selmanowitz Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro University in New York, and was one of Touro’s earliest full-time faculty members, having taught at the school’s Manhattan and Brooklyn divisions for both men and women since 1974. Upon moving to Israel in July 2002, he taught modern Jewish history at Touro’s Graduate School of Jewish Studies’ Israel branch campus for five years before retiring from academic teaching.

Prof. Penkower has lectured widely on American history and on modern Jewish history, and his numerous publications include “The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust,” (1983), “The Jews Were Expendable” that earned Prof. Penkower the Samuel Belkin Memorial Literary Award from Yeshiva University, together with his 1986 work, “The Emergence of Zionist Thought.” Especially noteworthy is Prof. Penkower’s five-volume study, four of which were published by the Touro University Press, of the rise of the State of Israel in the years 1933-1948, and his 2024 book “The Holocaust and Israel Restored: From Rupture to Revival”.

His latest book, “Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War against Israel and the Jews”, offers the first daily account of the war forced upon the State of Israel by Hamas’s brutal attack on its southern communities near the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. Focusing on the initial six months of that war, Professor Monty Penkower examines in detail its local, regional, and international significance.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

Given the fact that the war that Israel is currently mired in is not even over, there is an uncanny amount of material that has been written. There have been tens of thousands of articles. Someone told me more than a thousand books written in Israel about it. That struck me as a high number. But even if it’s too high, the number of books written in Hebrew about this war is huge. And we’re beginning to see books written about this war coming from all over the world, from all different kinds of angles, whether it’s about the wave of anti-Semitism that was unleashed or what we’ve learned about Hamas and radical Islam. They’ve been written in English, they’ve been written in Hebrew. They’ve been written in French, they’ve written all over the world. My guest today is someone whom I’ve known for very many years, someone from whom I have a tremendous amount of admiration and regard, Professor Monty Noam Penkower, who is Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the Makhon Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Prior to that, he was the Victor Selmanowitz Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College in New York.He also taught at Bard, Rutgers, Stern, and in the graduate history departments of NYU and Yeshiva University. He’s lectured in more places than one can take a stick at. And if you’re going to, I’m going to just read you for a second, a short, partial, very partial list of some of the works that Professor Penkower has written in the past to give you a sense of what a dramatic change a book about the current war is for his focus. And one of the things that we’re going to hear from him is why this focus. He’s at the top of his game in the field that has long been his. And this is a big change. It’s a hugely important contribution to our discourse. But we want to hear from Monty why he chose to do this. But just as a few examples, he wrote what came out in 1983, The Jews were Expendable, Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust, The Emergence of Zionist Thought, which came out in 1986, The Holocaust and Israel Reborn, From Catastrophe to Sovereignty, which came out in 94, Decision on Palestine Deferred, America, Britain in War Time Diplomacy 1939 to 1945, which came out in 2002. Just a couple of other examples: 20th Century Jews, Forging Identity in the Land of Promise and in the Promise Land, it’s a great title, by the way, 2010. And The Swastika’s Darkening Shadow: Voices Before the Holocaust, 2013. And that hardly completes the list. Then we’ll have his full biography in the notes on today’s conversation. Monty, it’s great to see you. Thank you for coming by this morning to have this important conversation. So let’s just start with that list of books. In my mind, you have always been a scholar of matters related to the Holocaust and the emergence of early Zionism. Not everything that you’ve done has fallen into that barrel, but that is certainly where the weight of your life’s work has been. And you have just published, really, I think, a fascinating new book, which is entirely different from what you’ve done in the past. The name of the book, which is put out by Touro University Press and Academic Studies Press. The name of the book is Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews. And as people will hear shortly, you pretty much take us in a very granular way through about the first six months of the war.A couple of things. First of all, the Hamas war against Israel is a reminder to us that this is also a war that doesn’t have a name. We really don’t know what the history books 10 years from now we’re going to call this war. Haravot Barzel, Swords of Iron, I think is a long shot. The October 7th war is, I think, becoming less and less likely as it spreads over many October 7ths. Some people said the Simchat Tora War, just like there’s a Yom Kippur war. But Simchat Tora, the joy of Torah, and then the war, that doesn’t go. So I think you and I both know that we don’t know what this is going to be called down the road. So you called it the Hamas War Against Israel, but you didn’t call it just then. You called it the Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews. People might say, well, they the Gaza envelope. There were a lot of Jews there, but there were some not Jews there, and a lot of Jews in other places who they didn’t attack. How is this war against the Jews? We’re going to come back to all of that.Let’s start out with the choice that you made at this stage of your life to write this book. It was a very different project. Why did you choose to do this now? And what were the unique challenges for a historian of the Holocaust and early Zionism to do a book like this at this point in history?We are meeting today, July 20th, 2025, day 653 of this war. When I cast my eye back at the very beginning, and we all know where we were when this erupted in shock and so forth, I said to myself, in a few days, there’ll be another war to erupt, which I call the war for the narrative. Namely, Israel, initially, as I suspected, was portrayed as David attacked mercilessly in a genocidal jihadist war. I’ll explain about that in a moment. But In a few weeks at most, David became portrayed as Goliath. In almost no time. And I knew that immediately, opponents of Israel, from the right to the left and everybody else, would immediately accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, the standard phrases that we have to unpack, which I tried to do. And so unlike everything that I’ve done over the last five decades, which include, which you didn’t put in, but I think that’s my master work, a five-volume study of the rise of Israel from 1933 to 1948, I had a real challenge here. Number one, and most important, no archives. The historian relies on historical fact as portrayed in primary source material. That was a real problem. And I knew those archives will be open maybe five decades hence, exactly as happened with the Yom Kippur War.Which just opened the archives recently.Exactly. And this happened 50 years and a day to that terrible tragedy.And you’re thinking that you’re going to be too old in 50 years to write this book.If I’m around, highly unlikely. Number one, no archives. Number two, as you begin studying this, you realize it’s a vast topic. It’s not limited as the Yom Kippur War was basically to the region and outside of Israel, basically. Here we’re speaking not only of the area and the region, we’re talking about the international world. And that requires a much broader, as you said, granular study across the board. So I felt compelled to do this, at least to get the record in a chronological sense on tape and then written down. It was extremely challenging for another reason. It’s draining. I’m at it morning, afternoon, evening. Every day. So what happened after six months? After six months, I said, This book is just too long. Like Topsey in gone with the wind, I just rowed. So I basically decide I got to stop. Obviously, the conclusion peppered with question marks. But the war continued. Another six months, volume two.So it’s coming out.It’s coming out in January of of 2026. But the war continued. Another six months of volume three that hopefully will eventually come out. It’s done. And the war still continues. Right now, July, I’m in volume four. That’s the greatest tragedy as far as I’m concerned. I wish I had stopped with volume one. Alas, the political and military echelon early on had the chutzpa, we’ll get back to that, hubris in the Greek word, to call for total victory.Which is ludicrous from the beginning.Absurd. And there’s another angle that one had to handle. Unlike the Yom Kippur war, I’m reminded of Clausewitz, a famous Prussian military strategist who said, War is an extension of politics. So one has to understand the political angles in operation administration in Israel, in America, the Biden administration then, now the Trump administration, and all other angles. And you’re dealing with not merely Hamas. You’re dealing with Iran’s proxies. You’re dealing with Iran itself. You’re dealing with Russia, China, the West, et cetera.Turkey, a little bit.A little bit, true, which leads me to my title. Why this title?Just to remind everyone, Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews. I searched as an historian, not for the name of the war, but how would I characterize it. Everybody threw out the word pogrom. Wrong. As you know, I wrote about the Kishinev Pogrom, the classic illustration of pogrom, which is a sudden attack over within two days because the Tsar insisted that it be stopped, and less than few than 50 Jews were killed, many wounded, et cetera. It wasn’t a pogrom. This was a genocidal, I’ll get back to that, clear jihadist attack. True, there were non-Jews in the envelope. Many Thais were killed or brought in and others, et cetera.Some Arabs as well.Correct. But it was clearly directed against the Jews who lived there. As Hebron in 1929, these weren’t Zionists, but they were targeted because they were Jews. And we know this because you only have to look at the Declaration of Principles of Hamas and the Hezbollah. They call for the destruction of the Jews, period. They don’t want us here. And alas, when you start to study the period, you realize some warned of this early on. In an appendix, I added this, which I don’t have in my other books. Number one, Moshe Dayan. I just want to read a little piece.Is this the eulogy for Ro’i Rothberg? Correct. Who was killed, obviously, in Nahal Oz, came from Tel Aviv there, all of ‘21. And Dayan says the following. He was then Chief of Staff, went to a side tent. He wrote it, incredible. It’s poetic. We will make our reckoning with ourselves today. We are a generation that settles the land. And without the steel helmet and the cannon’s more, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home, etc. He understood very early on.That’s ‘56, by the way.Now, the problem is, hence the title, Awakening, has a double meaning. Number one, Awakening at 6:29 in the morning, October 7th, to this horror. Premeditated, of course. Number two, Awakening, which was not present in the minds of many in the military and political echelons. We now know, and this was not really fully understood before, that there was a sense for the military, we mowed the lawn, we go in occasionally when there’s trouble, we mowed the lawn, we exit. That was not a strategy. For the long term because it kept continuing.Oh, it also did nothing about the infrastructures, the tunnels, and all that.Exactly. We had no clue, because we didn’t follow this, that more than $100 million meant for hospitals, schools, et cetera. We used, as you said, to build this labyrinth of tunnels that the only longer system is in North Korea. It’s bigger than the New York City system in the subways. And secondly, there is certainly in both echelons, especially the political, which begins with Bibi Netanyahu, of course, for years, we can placate Hamas. If we give more jobs to the Palestinians coming in. And besides this, we play against the PA because we don’t want to have a two-state solution. This is the thinking that emerges. Now, the irony is that Nine years before, I have this on tape, Bibi was in a TV station, and the interviewer said to him, So how are you different? He says, I’m Mr. Security. This will never It happened on my watch. Guess what? It did. The regrettable thing, just to finish on that point, is to this day, the Prime Minister has not taken any responsibility for what happened blaming it totally on the military echelon. And I’m convinced that the vast majority of Israelis, even those who want a hostage deal, et cetera, and those who say, no, we’ve got to go until the victory, they need a new leadership. They demand a new leadership. And that’s a remarkable change in my mind.There’s a lot to say about all of this. Obviously, every sentence you just said could be unpacked for hours. And unfortunately, you will have to do that for another time. But let’s talk a little bit about just the craft of writing a book like this. In other words, if you’re doing something on the emergence of Zionist thought from year X to year Y, so we all know where the obvious archives are. When you go to the library because many of those great books are on the shelves. Actually, the Ben Yehuda Project has put much of that online in here. The historian like you sits down on your touche and you start to read.You don’t have it here.What was the process of writing this book? What did you do? Did you go through all the issues of Haaretz and Times of Israel and Ma’ariv, and Yediot? What did you actually do?That’s just a, as they say, just a piece of it. First of all, unlike the Yom Kippur War and other prior wars, there’s a wealth of material just on the Internet, number one. So you have Internet sources.Just remember, by the way, the Yom Kippur War was 18 days, and you wrote about the first 171 days. Correct. So it’s almost It’s not 10 times as much.Exactly. Number one, the Internet. Number two, books. Number three, articles, interviews, et cetera. There was no end to it. And the historian has to then choose what is, what is the crucial element as he or she sees it, and what is tafel, what is less so. And you need the historian’s antenna, developed over many decades, to say, I think this is crucial. But I wanted to do much more than that. In the course of it, I understood there are individual stories that have to be told, however briefly, because there are far better books just devoted to individual stories. But there is that famous song, Superheroes.We’re a nation of Superheroes.Exactly. Which focused on the soldiers. But I didn’t only focus on the soldiers. Matan Abergil, who threw his body on the grenade to save camarades, and died. Aner Shapiro, out of uniform to save people in a shelter near the Nova Festival. He threw out seven grenades. Hamas tossed in, the eighth killed him. And he’s saying to his people, Wait, Tzahal is coming. It took two days for That area to be somewhat engrossed because the military wasn’t ready.You have, in addition to everything else, you have recordings of kids with their parents from that day. Those parents, by the way, tell them, Don’t worry, don’t panic. The army will be there in a second.Now, what makes this unique, and hence the word genocidal, there’s a zeal to what’s going on. It’s recorded by camcorders by Hamas. They later denied it, but we had these recordings where a guy says, in one case, Daddy, Daddy, I just killed 10 Jews.Yeah, he called his parents.And the father says, “Allahu Akbar!”.And he says, “Tell your mother also”.Yeah, and she says, “Come home”. You know, that thing. There’s great denial. But what bothered me, and that’s unique, On the one hand, these tremendous heroes, Awad Darawshe, an Arab who stayed with his patience in the Nova Festival. Although speaking Arabic, they killed him. He could have escaped. And there were many such instances. I don’t want to forget the Tatspitaniyot, the surveillance young women. I heard this from a personal account of a woman who survived as a Tatspitanit in another place. She records that in the major military base in the Gaza envelope, the women knew their end was near. They had no weaponry. None of the men around had guns. And they kept broadcasting till the very end. We now know, but hopefully a state commission that still is not in the works, we understand the politics behind it, it’s disgraceful, will indicate exactly what they passed on earlier on, and they were just, Oh, your job is just to record, et cetera. These are some heroes. At the same time, there are innocents on both sides. I wanted to be fair as an historian to have every actor and have his and her say, which indicates that it made it complex because I wanted to cover the Gaza story and account also for IDF errors, which is incredible to me. Here’s one story amongst many. I go on and on for hours. The mother of one of the three Israelis who were killed by accident in Gaza wrote to that group, Don’t worry, I forgive you. You did what you had to do and just continue doing.She spoke at a Shalem College graduation. We gave her an honorary degree. She’s an unbelievable human being.Now, that was one thing I wanted to emphasize. What is also remarkable, which you didn’t have in the Yom Kippur War and other things, is world Jewry uniting is in an unbelievable way from all over the world sending materials, including war material, because the IDF wasn’t ready. And what about the 300,000 youngsters who did everything to get on planes to come back from treks into Israel?Those are Israelis.Young Israelis. And what about even today? I, like thousands, were stranded because of the war recently, and people just clamoring to get home. Can you imagine a war is on, your life is at stake, and you say, I’ve got to get home, because this is, as we say in the prayer, this is our life. This is the Jewish future. And one has to remember, I quote rabbi Sacks in this regard, A Holy War never saved a soul. For them, it’s a Holy War, and that’s the second thing of awakening. They have to understand. Bernard Louis was the first of many to alert us to this years the great Princeton scholar. In radical Islamist thought, the world is divided into Islam and the infidels, and it’s a war to the end.By the way, so America is in the same boat that we’re in, as is Western Europe.Correct. Look at 9/11, Al Qaeda, et cetera. And we had far worse 9/11s on that day. Just 1,200 people killed, estimated, and 350 hostages, which reminds me my last point on this. I said it couldn’t be the Holocaust because we have a sovereign army to protect us. By the way, it’s to the IDF I dedicate this book.I saw that. It was very moving.But my emphasis there was from the Pasuk, Peace, Shalom Al Israel. We want to just live here in peace. My first hero in the preface, Ofir Libstein, the head of the Gaza troop area, Southern region. And he’d made every effort for a few years to bring Palestinians in, both with an industrial park and to bring, as some others did, to hospitals in Israel. And he was the first casualty. His mother was killed. His nephew was killed throwing himself on his beloved so that she would survive. She did. He did not. And there are so many such cases. But I just wanted, I have to say this one thing I could go on and on in the appendix, of all, I included letters from home to home from soldiers who died.There’s a whole book of those. If you’re reading this.It’s correct. I just thought this was absolutely incredible. A poem, okay, by Racheli Moskowitz, to indicate the unity of the Jewish people. I won’t read the poem. It’s too long. But the idea is, and I contacted her, How did you come to write this poem? A coat of many colors recalls Yosef. What’s the story? She was talking to her five-year-old son. It was the parashah where Yosef is sold by his brothers. And the son says, How could brothers do this? And she didn’t tell him. They thought initially to kill him. And then she said, How can I respond? And then she unpacked the oldest son’s bag, heavy knapsack, and says, Oh, look at this. A ceramic vest from Argentina, boots from Poland, et cetera. And she realized maybe this is a Tikun, a repair for what the Joseph brothers did. And that she told her her son. And that unity, of course, one could be a cynic or a realist, and say, Yeah, when the war’s over, we’re going back to the fractious atmosphere of judicial review for the months until the war. I don’t know. I have hope. Why do I have hope? Not only because our anthem is Hatikvah, the hope, but you consider the reservists who came back, the people who were out and came back. Of course, we have a great price to pay. I’m not talking about politically. The widows, the orphans, the traumas.20,000 people diagnosed with PTSD.Now, that’s just Israeli side. Gaza, it’s a moonscape. It’s rubble. It’s nothing. And alas, now, and that’s what the book is also trying to do, to be fair, to indicate the Biden administration’s positions, Qatar, on the one hand, playing firemen, helping negotiations, on the other hand, arsonist. They’re the ones who gave the money to Hamas and the Houthis and the Hezbollah, et cetera. Iran makes no secret of its desire to destroy the Jewish state. Notice I say Jewish state. For them, again, back to Louis, that’s why the subtitle is, and the Jews. They simply do not want us here. This is Holy Land.That’s their view. Now, obviously, we want people to read the book because it’s beautifully written and it’s unbelievably detailed. I think, by the way, it made me think of a very, very different book. It has nothing to do with your book at all. But it made me, when I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs a number of years ago, Steve Jobs’s life was basically the history of the computer, right? And so even though I read by the time he died, and then the book came out, but I’d forgotten about the very first Mac in the very first, and it was a it brought it back. And I think in a very strange, but much sadder way here, people who take a look at the book because we’ve now forgotten. We’ve forgotten a lot of things that we once knew, and we certainly didn’t know all the granular detail that you go into. I think that people go through this. It’s not an easy read. It’s not a fun read, but it’s a very accessible read. And people can really get a sense of really how this war unfolded. And we’re going to let the book do that.I want to ask you a couple of 30,000 foot questions. And you obviously have spoken all over the United States and more hundreds of times than you can begin to imagine. And you mentioned before you were very fair and you’re very, and I know you, so you’re a decent, deeply caring human being. And you acknowledge that Gaza is a moonscape, and there have been plenty of innocent people on the Gaza side killed, too. And we’re now almost two years into this pursuing some, absolute victory, which is absurd, in my view. If you were on a campus, you went to CUNY now, or you went to, I don’t know, City College, whatever, or you went to NYU or whatever, and you gave a talk about your book, the standard book tour that every author does. And a student got up to you and said, You know, but here’s what you’re not exactly saying, but you even admitted in your book. There has been genocide on both sides. You say the Hamas people, that was a genocidal attack. But also there’s been tens and tens of thousands of Gazans, of whom clearly many are innocent. Many were not, but many were innocent. And they might say to you, So why don’t you just come out and say what you know to be true? This was genocide on both sides. What does Monty Noam Penkower say in response to that question?It’s a false assertion because, and here I quote, Non-Jews. A fellow who runs the War Studies Department at West Point, pointed out directly that Israel has done more than any other army to try and avoid deaths of innocence. Alas, it’s happened a lot because Hamas often uses them as human shields. We have this proof over and over, and this is a charge by a non-Jew against this charge. Secondly, the British colonel who led the British forces in Afghanistan, Kemp, points out, Richard Kemp. According to the UN, a standard war has a ratio of civilians to military people killed nine to one. In this war, he estimates it’s 1. 5 to one. We have to understand that Israel, even warns people, get out of these buildings. We’re setting up humanitarian corridors because we’re in, no other army does that. I’m not denying that war is horrible. Victims on both sides but let’s not call it genocide. Let’s be honest and admit, and the IDF has admitted, when mistakes were taken and what has to be done, there are people who were brought into jail, IDF soldiers who committed mistakes. They tell them, don’t steal anything. Leave the houses the way you are. I’m not denying, as I said, it was Sherman, Civil War, war as hell. But nevertheless, don’t say genocide. What is genocide? Genocide is, as I said, the Hamas and Hezbollah declarations. But for campuses to have students totally ignorant to say something like, from the river to the sea, they can’t say which river or which sea. But we do know that in effect, to globalize the intifada means it’s going to be worldwide in Sydney. When the Opera House had an Israeli flag put up, Demonstrators came out and say, Gas the Jews. We’re going back to that reality.That’s what’s happening in Melbourne, and that’s what’s happening in Toronto, and New York is about to elect a Mayor.That’s why, exactly. And that’s why When I look at the campuses, it’s not the Columbia, of which I was proud to receive a degree, the PhD in 1970. But the fact is, the ignorance has to be changed changed, hopefully by reading such a book, by seeing the zeal of people who want to murder Jews simply because it’s a jihadist war. And that would be my response to these campus people. Ethnic Cleansing. Since 1967, the number of Palestinians has grown from 1 million to 5 million under Israeli control. Oh, that’s genocide? Certainly not. We have to be as historians, as students of history, and just intelligent people, understand the facts. My late mentor at Columbia, William Lichtenberg, told me a long time ago, Don’t editorialize. Let the facts speak for themselves. I’m hoping that my book contributes to that serious conversation. Let’s get the facts down.Okay. I actually hope that your book will do that as well. And the second volume and the third volume eventually will also become part of a really, I think, a critical account of what this word was all about, because there’s going to be a lot of noise. And so we need something that’s much more signal than noise. But let’s assume that you’re on this campus and you give that response to the student who asks you, well, isn’t there really genocide on both sides? And this is the very rare American student who has actually opened up a newspaper in the last five years. And the student says, yeah, well, okay, I hear you. But you know, there’s an Israeli guy who used to work for the army itself named Omar Bartow, who just wrote a piece in the New York Times that was called, I know genocide when I see it. I’m a student of genocide, and I know it when I see it, or something along those lines. And he says, he says the student, that this is very likely genocide. And this is an Israeli, an Israeli used work for the IDF. What’s your response to that, student?My response is, I don’t think it’s based on fact. I think that I and many other historians and non-Jews who are specialists in war, as I said, know genocide when they see it. And there were Arab born surgeons who came from England to help out the Zaka volunteers who did this incredible, incredible Chesed good deeds of trying to identify remains of bodies and so forth. And she said, looking at this, this is genocide. One didn’t simply kill, one beheaded, one slaughtered, raped, bounded children to parents. Israel never did anything like that in Gaza. Many are killed. I’m not denying it, but that’s not genocide. We have to understand. Genocide is Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish refugee who made it to the US and coined the term in a book in 1944, said straight away, genocide is a targeted effort to wipe out whole elements. Israel isn’t doing that.That’s obvious that it’s not doing that. That’s a different story. I want to ask you something else that you said before, because again, the day to day, what happened in October, November, December, January, that’s what this book is. And we want people to go get the book and read it. You said at the beginning, though, that at the beginning of this war, there were two things that you knew. One was that within days or weeks, David was going to turn from David to Goliath, which, of course, is exactly what happened, maybe even more quickly than you imagined it would because it was pretty much on a dime. Within a week or 10 days after the war started, we were already being accused of all kinds of things. And of course, women who claimed to have been raped were not believed, and that was unlike it would be with any other population. You also said something, though, about how this was really an extraordinary coming together of diaspora Jews and Israelis. And I remember the number of times that I went down there to the south to pick avocados or God only knows what, to lay pipes once, my wife and I did.There were all these people who are not Israeli, who there, and it really did seem like we would enter a new period of diaspora Israeli cooperation. Is your sense that that sense of partnership has survived the almost two years of war, or have we backslid on that? And is this relationship much more fraught than people like you and me might have hoped it was becoming in, let’s say, November, December, January, ‘23, ‘24?I’m reminded of a book by none other than Daniel Gordis, who studied the differences emerging between American Jewry and Israelis. I think it brought us together. We’re historians, my circle. We’re not social scientists looking ahead. We’re not sociologists. We cannot predict the future.Yeah, but you’re seeing in terms of what has happened already.Right. What has happened already, I see in young people a slide back somewhat. Obviously, there’s a difference between those of the ‘48, ‘67, even ‘73 time, and those of the intifadas. It’s a different attitude. But what is remarkable is that so far, I still see a unity. I’m more concerned about the youth in the future. When the war is over, we need to do much more in terms of education, not only here, to bring the center. After World War I, it was Yates, the center cannot hold. I sure hope it can, because it was, as we learned, if I may just go segue to the last biblical parashah, Pinchas. Zealotry is not the Jewish norm. The Jewish norm is neither to the right nor to the left. It’s hopefully to the center. I’m hoping that in intelligent young people from Israel and young people from America can somehow come together in some forum, forums, plural. And you and your circle can do a great deal in bringing this together to achieve some an intellectual dialog that is honest and fair.People who read your book are going to learn a tremendous amount of fact day by day, week by week, month by month. There’ll be some things that they’ve already heard, and they’ll see it from a slightly different view. And there’ll be things that they read that they had no idea happened because there’s individual stories and individual battles and whatever. But if they zoom up to 20,000 or 30,000 feet and they close the book at the end with the Moshe Dayan eulogy for Ro’i Rothberg and other things, when they step back from the book, what do you think their understanding about what we’re going through is going to be, how is it going to be different from how it was before they began the first pages of the book? What’s the larger change in picture that it’s going to leave them with?I purposely ended, as I told you, the conclusion with no definitive conclusions.Well, it’s also leading up to volume two and three of your own.Not only that, even without looking that far ahead. I raised all sorts of questions. And to be honest, I indicated, which impressed me, and I didn’t see it in previous wars, people who knew no one, lone soldiers or people from place X, and they’re going to their final resting place on Har Hertzl or elsewhere. And Israelis come out who don’t know them at all and raise flags out of respect. It’s unbelievably moving. Or people coming out of hospitals without legs their arms and everything, and they’re being cheered. It brings tears to one’s eyes. So what I end up, and I think every reader has to end up, I put it in bold face even. Go ahead, read. The final narrative has yet to be told. I don’t know how this is going to end or when, but I felt at least 50 years down the road, when, as I said, the archives finally do open, people can go back, at least to get the chronological record of who said what and when and what happened, et cetera. And the archive should flush out the story. But the final narrative, we have to wait.Monty, when did you make Aliyah? What year?It was July 1, 2002.2002. So you have been here for 23 years. Three years, right. Obviously, a student of Israel and Zionism for decades before that. Goes without saying. But you’ve lived in the thick of it in this neighborhood that we call Baca for almost a quarter of a century. I want to ask you a non-historian question by way of wrapping up, just a Jewish Israeli question. There’s been a terrible three years for Israel. We had a judicial reform issue, which regardless of where one stood on the issue, and there was legitimacy, I think, on many different sides, to watch the country get ready to rip itself to shreds and to vote, by the way, on the first plank that did pass just a couple of days before Tisha Be’Av. It was on Shisha Be’Av, I still remember, because that was the shirts that all came out. The sixth of Av, three days before the ninth of Av. I mean, it was just heartbreaking. And then before that, actually, of course, had Corona, which was its own social tragedy. And then we go from the judicial stuff right into October 7th. We’ve now been at war for almost two years.It’s not been pretty, as you pointed out. The government has yet to take any responsibility. We’ve not had the National Commission of Inquiry. We’re pursuing an absolute victory, which I think both of us agree is not attainable in the way that the government’s describing it, whatever. At the same time, you say there’s been unbelievable demonstrations of loyalty, of togetherness, of mutual support, relative to October 6th, 2023, or when you got here, 2002 to now, are you more bullish or less bullish on the Israel that will be here for your grandchildren? Are you more confident that this country is heading towards a place of security, confidence, stability, or are you more worried?Let me go back to 1955. This is the personal history. I was the first American to celebrate celebrate his bar mitzvah in the State of Israel. I met the President, Ben Zvi. I met the two chief rabbis. I got a special brachah from Rabbi Herzog Zatzal, in Yeshurun.The grandfather of the current President.Exactly. So my ties were very close. Many years in Masad, the Hebrew-speaking camp, a vatik Masad, all that. It was just a question of when and where. When I came with my late beloved wife, Yael, on January 2th. And she, a seventh-generation saber, she’s coming home. And I said to her straight away: we’ve come home. That’s it. I’ve never regretted, whenever I’m abroad, even before the war. And it’s certainly during the war, when I was stuck abroad, I say, I’m coming home. I don’t want to be there. This is the Jewish future. So I don’t know about bullish or not, but we’re a people of hope. I think that Israel, like the Jewish people over millennia, what are we doing here, after all, despite all these wars, from the beginning of our Balfour Declaration and on and on, facing enemies that are not ready to compromise. There are hopes. Abraham Accords, maybe who knows what. I’m not counting on that too much. The bottom line is, as they said in the American Revolution, Keep your powder dry. We have to be ready for any possibility. But I look at this young generation, dismissed earlier as TikTok generation. Is the phrase, They’re at least as strong and committed to this country in unbelievable ways. The great Murray, the British columnist who says, I look at this generation as opposed to the West. It’s an astonishing generation.It’s our equivalent of the greatest generation, what Americans talk about.Exactly right, of World War II. And as a student of World War II, I make the comparisons. So I’m hopeful. You mentioned grandchildren. I have now great grandchildren in Israel. More on the way. And bezrat Hashem, I hope it’s not only Hashem. It’s obviously in some, we have to rely on the army as well. And thank God, they’ve come through. Young people, you go to and you see these terrible young men and women lying there at the last, and they gave everything for this country. We should hope that their lives were not given in vain.Their lives were not given in vain. And in order to honor their lives and their memories, we need to know the story of which they were apart. And we need to really understand in a serious, thoughtful, factual, chronological, very, very substantive way, what the story of this terrible war has been. And so Monty’s first volume is already out. It came out a few months, I think in February or something like that. Awaken to Radical Islamist evil, the Hamas war against the Israel and the Jews. The next volume will be out, you said in January. January, 2026. What’s the title of that one?Same. Part two.Part two, okay. And then there’s going to be down the road, a part three. And I hope you’re going to run out of parts. I hope so. Anyway, but Monty Noam Penkower, really, one of the world’s truly great historians of these last decades of Jewish history, has turned his pen and his eye to a very different side of the world from which he normally writes about. The book is out. We’re going to, of course, link to it in the notes for today, put out by Toura University Press and Academic Studies Press, Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews. Anyone who wants now the, basically, the official official of history of this terrible, terrible war and wants to remember and learn in very significant chronological, well-researched fashion, what’s happened here and abroad. This is the book. This is the author. Monty, thank you very much for taking the time to have this conversation.Thank you.

As we’ll explore in greater detail tomorrow (October 7 is Yom Tov Sukkot, so we can’t post then), the confluence of October 7 this week and Simchat Torah next week, along with what may be happening on the hostage front, has many people very hopeful, but terrified of being disappointed, once again.

Perhaps because we do not yet know what is going to happen, and whether, as Netanyahu has promised, the hostages will be home during Sukkot, this is the moment to reflect on these past two terrible years: how it started, what we’ve learned, where we will be if this is really “over” (whatever that might mean), and what enormous issues an Israel-not-at-war is going to have to tackle.

We’ll start that tomorrow and explore it further in the next few weeks.

Is the longest war in Israel’s history about to end? I can remember many moments in which this entire nation held its breath, waiting to see if something was going to happen, but I don’t recall anything like this—a desperate wish to be able to hope, and a terrible fear of being disappointed again.

Despite that fear, hope is in the air. For all sorts of reasons. The hostages possibly coming home is the main one. But not the only one.

Shortly after Yom Kippur, I received these videos of the conclusion of the public Tel Aviv Yom Kippur service conducted by Rabbi Joe Wolfson (who was on the IFTI podcast just about a year ago). If you look at the videos carefully, you’ll see some “classically” religious people there, but also many non-religious people. Men without kippot, women in pants, men and women sitting together, no mechitzah, and thousands of people at Kikar Atarim (not far from the Tel Aviv beach and near the iconic Gordon pool, if you know it …) — proving that Israelis of all (ok, most) walks of life can spend the year’s holiest day together.

Rabbi Wolfson, as our listeners may recall, is the dynamic, visionary and charismatic rabbi who leads Ben Yehudah 126, a classic, iconic Tel Aviv synagogue that is experiencing an extraordinary revitalization. Through Ben Yehudah 126 and his other organization, JLIC TLV Community, Rabbi Wolfson is having an enormous impact on the young, religious community in Tel Aviv. (He’s the person standing on the chair in the video at the very top of this post). The videos show what’s possible with passion, drive, warmth and creativity—Tel Aviv, the very symbol of secular Israeli life, with an outdoor service (these videos were filmed about ten minutes after the Fast ended, but note how many people are still there) attended by thousands, who end their 25 hours of fasting and worship with these three elements: (a) the prayer for the hostages, also above, (b) the classic prayer for those in captivity, and (c) Hatikvah.

The sign above, advertising the public worship, reads as follows:

KIPPUR IN ATARIM SQUARE

This year, we’re all praying together, more than any other year—for our soldiers, for the hostages, for the country, and for ourselves—together.

And here’s what unfolded at the very end of Yom Kippur:

Given what happened in Tel Aviv two years ago with outdoor services, who wouldn’t manage to feel some hope?

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

The morning after Yom Kippur, I walked over to a bookstore to pick up a book I’d heard about over the holiday. On the way, on the sidewalk of Emek Refa’im (one of the main drags in south Jerusalem), it was literally hard to walk on because of all the booths that had suddenly sprung up … but no one pushed, no one complained.

Perhaps, given what we’re witness to around the world and what’s happening to to many Jews who are publicly Jewish, people understood that a sidewalk crowded because of these stands is actually something to celebrate …

Still, the hope in the air notwithstanding, we all know that there are very turbulent times ahead. Even if the hostage deal does happen (how incredible would Simchat Torah be if there were actually home?) and even if the war is ending, the country has a slew of issues to address, all of which will shape the direction and even the very nature of the country:

* We’re heading into an election year. Will Israelis, battered at home and pariahs abroad, decide they want change? It’s not so obvious.

* The Haredi draft issue is going to come up as soon as the Knesset ends its holiday recess. The Haredim have threatened to bring down the government if they don’t get their bill. The rest of the country will be apoplectic if they do. What will Bibi do?

* And remember Judicial Reform? In the first section of Makor Rishon this Shabbat, at the bottom left of the following, there appeared an ad by the JPPI, the highly regarded Jewish People Policy Institute.

Here’s the ad up close … it’s a sure sign that some leading experts believe that Constitutional issues either will or should be among the next that we tackle (I’d bet more on the “should” than the “will,” but we will see):

In these Days of Awe, when Israel is bitterly divided, this is the time for a national introspection [DG—the term used is cheshbon nefesh, associated with personal introspection of Yom Kippur]. The Jewish People Policy Institute suggests that we create a “thin constitution” — agreeing on new rules of the game for running the country based on a constitutional agreement about the relationships between the branches of government. That way we will be able to bring stability to our society and the country.

NB: the QR code in the ad above works even off the screen. It will take you to a page that has an English option, too, so you can get a sense of JPPI’s take on the issue.

If we’re fortunate enough to have the war behind us, it’s going to be time to being to address the many issues that will determine whether this country can hang together. They’re all incredibly complicated, so in the weeks to come, that’s what we’ll try to unpack.

1

I went to get my hair cut on Monday morning, a few hours before Rosh Hashanah. I love the woman who cuts my hair. She does a great job, but no less important and perhaps even more, she’s truly hilarious and — because she knows I appreciate it — readily shares her spicy insights on the (mostly) religious crowd she serves (she’s completely secular). In a different life, she’d have been a fun sociologist to learn from.

“Where are you for the holiday?” she asked me as she snipped away. She knows our kids, as she’s cut their hair over the years (and now does some of our grandchildren, too), so she wanted to know which family was coming in, how long those from out of town were staying, all that. I filled her in.

Then, I asked her, “What about you? What are you doing?”

“Oh, we’re not celebrating,” she said.

“Oh,” I said very matter of factly. Whatever.

“But,” she continued, when I’d thought that part of the conversation was over, “we’re getting together with a whole group of other people who also don’t celebrate.” In other words, she was going to Petach Tikvah (a bear of a drive before the holiday, so we ended up spending a lot of time talking about what time she should leave Jerusalem—we decided no later than 4:30 for a 7:00 pm dinner) to not mark Rosh Hashanah by having Rosh Hashanah dinner with a bunch of friends who were also not marking Rosh Hashanah, but were having a big holiday dinner.

In these parts, “We’re not celebrating” means, I guess, “We’re not making kiddush.”

Are there people here who actually do nothing? I’m sure that there are. But I’ve yet to meet one.

There is much to say about what that little exchange says about identity in this country. It’s for another time, but this is one of those places where even getting your hair cut can leave you thinking about what Jewishness has come to mean in this world of ours, even for those who don’t realize it. Or do.

Right after Rosh Hashanah, an Instagram link to a video of another Rosh Hashanah dinner—this one at Kibbutz Nir Oz—made its way around Israeli social media.

It’s been two years, so if the details of what happened at Nir Oz are now fuzzy, here’s a review of the horror:

Of the 386 residents present, 47 were killed (including 41 kibbutz residents and 6 festival attendees who sought refuge there after fleeing the Nova), and 76 were taken hostage. Of those taken, 67 were abducted alive and 9 were killed either in the kibbutz, en route, or in Gaza. In total, 69 kibbutz residents were killed, including those who died in captivity in Gaza. The attackers entered all but six homes, causing massive destruction and leaving nearly every family impacted by death, abduction, or homelessness.

In the brief clip at the very top of this post, you see Gadi Mozes speaking to those gathered in the kibbutz dining room (the clip below shows that they were bused back to the kibbutz for the occasion). Here’s the full clip that made its way around social media, with subtitles where necessary:

I have no idea if they made kiddush at Kibbutz Nir Oz. I’m quite sure, though, that none of those people would have said that they weren’t observing or celebrating. It was more than a new year. It was a new chapter. A new lease on life.

We need many more such chapters and many more such leases.

And, as Gadi noted, what we desperately need is a Rosh Hashanah during which no Israelis are still being held captive.

And, speaking of new beginnings …

David Sherez, co-founder of the new political party El Ha-Degel (who has appeared on our podcast—see here to listen to the episode and/or to learn more about the party), asked us to share information about an English-language online (Zoom) parlor meeting the party is hosting on Tuesday evening, Israel time.

It’s geared to Israelis and thus potential voters, I assume, but if you want to sign up, you just join this WhatsApp group. El Ha-Degel will take it from there and get you a Zoom link.

Finally, it’s sort of an Israeli thing to send clips of poetry instead of “Rosh Hashanah cards” (which I assume are a thing of the past? I actually have no idea …).

One dear friend, Yaakov L. (who in turn gave credit to his wife for the selection), sent me this quote from Yehudah Amichai’s 1958 book of collected poems,במרחק שתי תקוות, hard to translate, but probably best rendered as “Two Hopes Away.”

The two Hebrew lines above read something along the lines of:

The ruthless year’s feet crushed me, yet my hands rest on the waist of the new year.

Is that a suggestion of a time when the years will no longer feel ruthless? When crushing feet will be replaced by hands on a waist? A suggestion, perhaps, of a dance just about to begin?

Let’s hope so. Let’s pray so.

Shana Tova.

In any event, to understand the event in the video, we first need to know about this song, Al Tira Yisrael, “Do not fear, Israel.” It’s hugely popular in Israel (the clip above is from an IDF Rabbinate video), and there are countless performances online (just copy and search for אל תירא ישראל). The song describes the escape of the biblical Jacob from Esau and his marriages to Leah and Rachel. Its chorus, which strengthens Jacob’s spirit, contains the words “Fear not, Israel [DG-which is Jacob’s other biblical name], fear not, for you are indeed a lion’s whelp, and if a lion roars, who will not fear?”

The song, meant to highlight the Mizrachi tradition in Israeli music, was released in the early 1970’s, and won third prize at the Eastern Music Festival of Song in 1971. The original plan had been for it to be performed at the Festival by Yigal Bashan, who would go on to become a very successful singer, songwriter and actor, but Bashan, though about to be discharged from the army, didn’t get IDF permission to attend, so the song was performed instead by Moshe Hillel, another hugely popular singer and writer.

Like almost everything in Israel, the song went through a period of being politicized, when in 2000 as a symbol of support for Aryeh Deri [DG: “aryeh” is Hebrew for “lion”], to bolster Deri’s spirits as he was about to enter prison for corruption and later, as a song of support as he continued his political career (he’s a member of the current government).

But“do not fear, Israel” has long since lost its biblical connotations and even its political resonance among most of those who sing it, and is, instead, seen as a song to bolster the spirits of the nation.

Here are the words and transliteration of the refrain, as seen on the Zemirot Database. The words to the entire song can be found on this page of the National Library of Israel website.

With some familiarity with the song now in hand, it’s more fun to watch this gathering of the Israeli National Basketball Team on the eve of their leaving to compete in Eurobasket, the European Championship, and their reactions to what they’d thought was going to be a classical music concert, but was, of course, a flash mob:

May the new year, 5786, be remembered mostly for moments like this, and most importantly, for the speedy return of the hostages, for whom today is their 717th day of horrific captivity.

With prayers for a much, much better year ahead …

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

That is what makes Rabbi David Stav so exceptional—in all the meanings of that word. His vision for an inclusive Judaism, his commitment to an Israel characterized by openness to Jews of all sorts, his vision of Orthodoxy that embraces and enriches Jews no matter their background is precisely the kind of religious spirit that I imagine Isaiah might have had in mind when he said that Zion would be a spiritual wellspring.

As Rosh Hashanah draws near, we are honored and delighted to welcome Rabbi David Stav back to Israel from the Inside, as he helps us shape our thoughts, our prayers and our hopes in these momentous days.

Rabbi David Stav is a graduate of Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav and has qualification as a Rabbinical Judge from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

Rabbi Stav lectures in the women’s Judaic program at Bar Ilan University, authors a weekly column in the Israel Hayom newspaper and recently published several books on Halacha and the Bible.

The Chief Rabbi of Shoham — an Israeli city that is home to a large secular population — Rabbi Stav has long dedicated his life to bridging the social divides between religious and secular life in Israel. After assassination of Yitzchak Rabin, he and several colleagues founded Tzohar—an organization that “makes Jewish life accessible to secular Israelis—which received the 2009 Presidential Award for Volunteers.

Rabbi Stav was previously a candidate for Israel’s Chief Rabbinate and has long been central to efforts to revolutionize the relationship between religion and state.

To learn more, we invite you to visit Tzohar’s website and Facebook page.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

There's a verse in the Book of Isaiah, a part of which is known very well to most of our listeners, I assume, which it seems to me is the most appropriate way, perhaps, to begin an introduction of today's extraordinary guest, rabbi David Stav. The verse says, once again, Isaiah 2: 3, And the many people shall go and say, 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of God, to the house of the God of Jacob, that we may be instructed in God's ways, that we may walk in God's paths, for instruction shall come forth from Zion, the word of God from Jerusalem. For instruction, or Torah, shall come forth from Zion, the word of God from Jerusalem. And I think for many of our listeners, there are many things that come from Zion and Jerusalem that we're all very interested in. There is politics, there is tragically war, there is literature, there is music, there is history. But for too many of us, I think, when we ask ourselves to where am I going to turn to find genuine spiritual instruction, genuine meaning out of the religious side of Judaism, all too often, tragically, the state of Israel is the place that we don't think of turning to because so much of what religion has become in this country has become problematic in ways that we won't even bother going into at this moment. But one of the great exceptions to that is rabbi David Stav. We've had the privilege of having on the podcast several times before. He has served in a variety of important positions which we will put in the notes for today. Following the Rabin assassination in 1995, along with the Rabbi Yuval Cherlov, rabbi Stave established the Zohar organization, which is designed to bring Jewish tradition and Jewish values and Jewish life cycle programs to thousands and thousands and thousands of Israelis, many of whom are not religious traditional and therefore wouldn't have access to them without the work that he does. And he will explain to us a bit in his conversation with us today about some of the ways in which that challenge has manifested itself on Yom Kippur in recent years. We're delighted and honored to have Rabbi Stav with us once again to help us prepare and think about the high holiday season in a year which is going to be a challenging, difficult, painful, but critically important one as well. Rabbi Stave, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much

The first time that we met, you may not recall. We sat in this very office, and we didn't really know each other at that point. And you said to me, just so I can figure out who's sitting across from me, how are you doing? And it was during the time of the judicial upheaval. We'll use a a non-judgmental term, upheaval. It was, I think, in the middle somewhere. I told you the truth that I was broken-hearted and devastated by what was happening to this country and very worried about its future. Little did either of us suspect that we would look back at those months as the good old times because something much, much, much worse was about to happen. We've been involved in a terrible war for almost two years. It shows no signs of ending immediately. We are just as divided as we were during 2023. Let me tell you a brief word about the variety of our listeners today. Our listeners are Israelis, and they're foreigners. They all speak English, or they wouldn't be listening to us in English. They range from people who are in Shul three times a day, every day, no matter what, to people who don't go to Shul. Some people don't go to Shul because they object as a matter of principle, and some people don't go to Shul because it's just not interesting for them, and they find other ways to express. So we're talking to not religious and secular, I hate those terms, but we're talking to people whose souls are going to express something during this next period of high holidays in very different kinds of ways. And I wanted to ask you basically one question that has two parts. The question overall is, how should we be thinking about ourselves as individuals and ourselves as a Jewish people at this time? And the two parts are the very personal and the national. And of course, the liturgy for the Yamim Nora'im, the Makhzor, has both, who will live and who will die, who in the right time? Who in the too soon? I mean, yes, it's true of all of us. We're all saying it together, but we're really thinking about ourselves or those people immediately the closest to us, whose loss terrifies us. I mean, it's a very, very personal moment. And there's many, many, many of those moments. And then there are also moments in the Makhzor, which are very national, in a sense, the afternoon work service, we say in Musaf, of the high priest going in the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, which many people now know better than they used to, because of Yishay Rivo and the beautiful song that he wrote based on it, but changing some of the words. And there's the martyrology, the 10 people who were slaughtered by the authorities for their insistence that they continue the Jewish tradition. So we're in a period of time that is very personal, very national, very painful. If in Yom Kippur of 2023, I specifically remember some of the newspapers in 2023 saying, Okay, it's 50 years since the Yom Kippur War. The cloud over Yom Kippur has finally dissipated. It's spread. Now, Yom Kippur can be Yom Kippur again. It can be just Yom Kippur. The war was the war, but it's now no longer taking over the holiday. And there's no way that we can say that on this Simcha Torah, it's not going to be taken over. It's going to be very painful once again. So you was really, to my mind, one of the great introspective religious thinkers of our time in the State of Israel. I hope you can give us all, religious, secular, more traditional, less traditional, more certain, more uncertain thoughts about how we use this time, both on the personal level and on the national level. And I just thank you for whatever it is that you will teach us and the ways in which I know you're going to enrich us.Actually, your questions are so important and referred to so many areas that I hope that I will remember all of them in order to refer. If not, you will remind me. Well, I would like to continue from the place we stopped three years ago. I would like to refer to Yom Kippur, which took place two weeks before the war broke out, to Yom Kippur a year ago and to the upcoming Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur, October 2023, was the first Yom Kippur in Israel's history that tens of gathering of religious and non-religious people for prayer in Tel Aviv, including Tzoh Haminyanim that we do every year, for the first time in Israel's history, were disrupted, were disturbed, violently, physically, orally violated by people that wanted to disturb the davening, the prayer, just because they thought they did not have a mechitza, a separation, or did have a separation. Just to think about it, that three years ago, actually, it's two years ago. Two years ago. Two years ago, the entire country was busy with this stupid question, How will the prayer take place in Tel Aviv? People disturb one another. Even in places where there was no mechitza, people cursed and pushed and hit others because they were practicing in the traditional way.In the Jewish state.In the Jewish state. That's one thing. I remember myself a day before Simchat Torah. People don't remember that today. We were all busy with applied to the Supreme Court about the dancing in Simchat Torah. How will they look like? Will it be separated? Will it not be separated? Will there be a mechitza? Will there not be a mechitza? I remember myself urging to the mayor of Tel Aviv, please keep the status quo. Let people do what they they were doing for years. Don't touch it. That year, we did not dance on Simcha Tora. We all know what happened in Simcha Tora. Everybody knows about the source of Yom Kippur. And let me begin with a short idea, a dvah Torah, to add something to the knowledge of people. Everybody knows that the source of Yom Kippur comes from the tradition that God was forgiving the Jewish people for the sin that they have sinned with a golden calf. It was forgiving to Moshe Rabenu on Yom Kippur. And since then, it became the day of attainment, a day of repentance. But there is a previous source in ancient sources that says that that's not the first occasion that occurred on Yom Kippur. And the first occasion that occurred in Yom Kippur was the selling of Yosef by his brothers to the others, to the merchants, the Arabs, the Ishmaelites, Midianites, whoever they were, the selling of Yosef was on Yom Kippur. We all wonder when we arrive to the third prayer, Musaf, you mentioned the poet about the 10 people that were slaughter by the Romans and the Babylon and the Eretz Israel Talmud, raised a question, why do we mention it? Why did it occur? And what is it? How is it connected to Yom Kippur? It engaged to Tish'a B'av. That's the day where we commemorate all the suffering. But what connection does these 10 people, these 10 holy sages, how are they connected to Yom Kippur. And the answer is because the reason for these 10 people to be slaughter was the punishment for the 10 brothers that sold the brother and this sin still exists among us, that we sell one another. We don't trust one another. We don't care enough one about the other. So Yom Kippur, on its very, very beginning, begins with the relationship relationship between ourselves. Before we start dealing with the relationships with God, whether we sing with the golden calf or with other sins that we sing towards God, it begins with the fact that We didn't know how to get along one with another. And that's the Yom Kippur that took place here two years ago. Last year, which Yom Kippur was a year, almost a year after the Israeli society showed such tremendous solidarity. Percentage of draft, over 140 people came from all over. We're ready to sacrifice their lives, soldiers, civilians who we are talking about, were so focused in just helping one another. And we saw how the entire society was drafted, the civil society, the army, the reservists, others. Everybody was drafted to that mission to help, to show solidarity, to try to repaint a bit of the scene that we have seen the year earlier with a big device that was here. You know, last Yom Kippur, maybe the beginning of the process of tikun, of fixing, of renovating this society, took place in Tel Aviv. The Supreme Court allowed to make prayers gatherings with separation. But the group that raised all this, you decided, because of peaceful issues, let's not raise this issue. And they decided to pray in a closed hole, not raising this issue again. We in Zohar, we started, we arranged many Minyanims, but one of the biggest Minyanims was in the Hostages Square, where there were more than two and a half thousand people. The seperation was not physical. It was by the Bima and by the Ark that was put in the middle. And the prayers were dedicated for the hostages. Actually, in the Avinu-Malcanu, the prayer that we used to say towards the end of the repetition. Our Lord, our King, our Father, please release this and this man, this and this boy, this and this girl. And yesterday, I got a phone call from the Cantor that was leading the prayer last year, telling me the following amazing story, fascinating story. Next to him was one of the mothers of the hostages, Merav Leshem Gonen.Romy is her daughter.Romy. Romy was in captivity. He was kidnapped in Gaza. When he said, L'Havino Malkenu, he mentioned when he said, Ravinu Malkenu, he mention each name, Please release Romy, bat Merav, et cetera, et cetera. She calls him two weeks after she was released. She calls him and she tells him the unbelievable story. She tells him, I don't know if you know, but my daughter told me that these murderers, these massacres from Hamas, took her from one of the tunnels on Yom Kippur. They took her to one of the houses, and she watched television, and she saw how you and me are mentioning her name. And she said, That's a sign from God that everything will be okay with me, and I will be released, sooner or later. I got a WhatsApp a day afterwards from a woman that is absolutely secular, telling me, That's the first time I came to Davenin on Yom Kippur, me and my daughter. We came for Kol Nidrey. We couldn't allow ourselves not to come again. Actually, I want to give you a virtual hug for what amazing tikun, for what amazing correction was this for the Israeli society. Unfortunately, as it happens quite often to us as Jews, we are often, we are stubborn. And quite quickly, we came back to our ancient wars, to our ancient, as the Talmud says, and still this sin is existing. Sitting among us, and we come back to the same fights, to the same struggles, inner struggles, internal struggles. And now we can choose two ways. We can focus on the bad things that occurred to us in the last year, and the list is very long, and I'm not going to go into the details. I would rather focus on the other option. I want to call it with one word, Tikva, hope. We can end this year, and concluding this year with despair, with sorrow, with frustration. And there are a lot of reasons for all these, but we can look at this year and to see the tens of thousands of reservists and the families that even if many of them do not agree with the decision of the government to enter to Gaza, but they still come, and they are ready to do whatever is needed to do in order to finish that story. And these holidays, they will not be home. We can look at those, the civilians that are dedicating their time to help those who were evacuated from the places, to help those who suffer from post-trauma, to help those that lost their civilians on the dearest members of the family, to see how they help the injuries. We see such people that volunteer in order to help these people. So we can look on one, a half of the cup, which is empty, but there is a lot of good things that are done in Israel, in the Israeli society, and we should have hope. And hope, as Rabbi Sacks explains, in many places, is not optimism. Optimism means that, Well, I'm optimist. I think it will be okay, but I'm doing nothing in order to promote it. To have hope means that you believe that it could be good, but you believe that it's given to your hands, and you believe that you ought to do something. I think That's the mission for the next year. I started to refer to your question to give a perspective to Yom Kippur from that Yom Kippur two years ago, the Yom Kippur of last year, and the challenging Yom Kippur of the upcoming year. That's about the national aspect of the high holidays. Of course, there is an individual aspect to the holidays, but maybe we'll talk about this in a minute.Well, yeah, I do want to talk about it right now because I think it's so hard for people. Look, even aside from Israel, I mean, much of the world feels broken. After the tragic assassination in the United States, not that long ago, a lot of the newspapers spoke to young people who said, basically, something's very sick. They were talking about America, not Israel then. They were just saying, something's very sick. A person can't even go to a campus and talk. You can agree, you can disagree. Something's very wrong. And a lot of people who were than the college students said, What a world have we left our children here? I mean, the planet, the condition of the planet, wars everywhere, the gradual erosion of all of the rights and responsibilities that made up. We thought it was just part of the state of nature of the West, freedom to gather, freedom to speak, the rights of the individual, a certain amount of respect and honor in plain discourse. Of course, people get hot under the collar and people argue. But there's a sense that people have that we're leaving to the younger generation a much less perfect world than the one that we inherited. I think that's, of course, it's a public issue, and it's a national issue or it's an international issue. But there's also something very, very personal there. I'll allow myself to say that we're having the privilege of having this conversation with your grandson sitting in the room with us. Shortly after we finish this interview, you're going to go get him his for his bar mitzvah, which is really a day he'll remember for the rest of his life. You won't remember this, but he'll remember the rest of the day with you for the rest of his life. And many of us will have our grandchildren underneath our talit or they'll be sitting next to us. They'll be running in, they'll be running out. And it's very hard for me, at least to look at these little, minor, little, 10, 5, whatever. It's going to be hard to look at them and not ask myself, what are we leaving them? What are we saddling them with? And so leaving aside the national and the obligation to fix society, it just feels that the world's very broken. And I think many people are asking, What can I do around Yom Kippur, around Rosh Hashana, maybe even Sukkot relates to this a bit, I think, in its own way, moving from the walls of the Beit Knesset to something much more exposed outside. But what thoughts can we take on the more personal, intimate individual level, given everything that feels so broken and so sad at this time.Well, I know that one of the very famous books of rabbi Sacks is called To Cure a Broken World. At least that's the name in Hebrew.I think it's to heal the broken world. I don't remember for sure.I think that's the name of the book. I would like to put things in proportion. First of all, I know that it's quite popular to describe the society in the world as a broken world. And I don't want to ignore the phenomena that you refer to. But in America, in North America, it's a big loss for the state of Israel, for the Jews, for the Americans, for the Americans to lose somebody that was a great speaker and a great man just because he expressed views that certain people did not like, just to murder him in the middle of the day because of no reason. But to be honest, in the United States of America, there are almost 40,000 people that are murdered every year, politicians and officers and just regular students, that crazy guy that was mad at his teacher comes and takes a gun and kills and murders eight innocent boys or girls that went to school for no reason, and they're in no connection to nothing. It's a challenge, and I'm not undermining the question, but I just want to put it in a proportion. I mean, it's not something new that, wow, until now, there were no murders in America, and this year, something dramatic has occurred in America. Well, that's not the case, as we know. I suppose, I hope that will not arrive to that. But even in the Jewish society, we all remember the murder of Gedaliah Ben-Achikam. We remember the selling of Yosef. Actually, before they sold him, the brothers wanted to kill him. Just was an initiative of Reuben. They said, Why? What will we gain, Reuben and Yehuda? What will we gain from killing him? Okay, let's sell him. We don't like him. Let's sell him to be a slave. We remember that the first brotherhood was ended in the beginning of the first Book in Bible, how Cain is killing, is murdering. I'm not undermining, but I want to put in the right place and not to exaggerate that phenomenon. Having said that, I think that, and that has a deep connection to our high holidays. One of the ceremonies, I don't know if every family is doing that. But I want to urge everybody, it doesn't matter if he goes to Shul, if he'll go to synagogue, he will not go to synagogue. I want to recommend. There is an ancient ritual that we do in our family. Actually, it's brought in the books, in the traditional books, that the parents should give a bless to the children on the Eve of Yom Kippur. What are they doing there? Well, I bless my children every Friday night. So what is special about the interaction between parents and kids in the Eve of Yom Kippur? Because we had one more thing. I'm forgiving you for the sins that you have seen to me, and I'm urging you to forgive me for the sins that I have sinned to you. Every parent knows that he has sinned to his children. It could be for not paying them attention enough, for not being enough with them, for dedicating too much time for the work and less time for them. It begins with that. Sometimes I yelled at them without being right. Sometimes maybe I hit them without being right. And vice versa. I think the most important part of the holidays before we come to our relationship with God is to deal with our relationship with ourselves. When I say with ourselves, I'm not referring to society. I left the national issues, and I'm focusing now on myself, myself and my spouse, with my wife, with my children, those who are privileged to have parents. I'm not privileged already because my mother passed away five, six years ago. But those who are privileged, the relationship with the parents, with the brothers, sisters, et cetera. Why do we refer to that? Because what is the covenant between us and God? What is the connection? What is it based on? It's based on the idea that we understand that life has meaning, that life could be just regular secular life, and life could be sanctified. When I say sanctified, I want to give a meaning to what I'm doing. I'm not just here was born accidentally and going to end my life in a year or in 50 years, and they will be meaningless. No, I want my life to be full with content, with meaning. How do I do that? It's based on covenants that I create in my life. My covenant with my wife, my covenant with my family, the fact that I understand that there is a meaning to the family I established. There is a meaning for the way I educate my children, There is a meaning for what I'm doing, for what I'm not doing. There is an amazing book written by an Italian-American guy. I don't remember his exact name. I think it's Luigi or Loegia. The Hebrew name of his book is To Live and to Love. He describes his biography, and describes how when he was 10, 12 years old, he was a very tough student. The principal would kick him out every day from school. In the days that, coincidentally, the principal was not there and he did not kick him out, he escaped from school. The father calls his son one day, this Luigi, and he calls him and says to him, Look, I pay a lot of money. The tuition is very expensive. I see no reason for you to continue in school. You know what? I have no problem. Please leave the school. You don't want to go to school. The principal doesn't like you. So don't go to school. You don't have to But I have two conditions. We have a family dinner at 6, 7 o'clock every night. I want you to come to dinner with two things. A, tell me something new that you learned about the world. B, tell me somebody in this community that you caused him to smile, that you have done something good for him today. That's what I asked for you. I want you to learn something new about the world, and I want you to do something good for somebody else. If a day and you cannot respond, you cannot mark a V saying that I have done these two things, that means that that day was wasted, was not used properly. And I think that Rosh Hashana, the beginning of the year, that's exactly the meaning of that day. We want to look to our past to see, to check ourselves, to see whether we can mark every day and tell ourselves, Well, we were leaving living a meaningful life. But suppose the answer will not be, will not satisfy as we want. We have a chance to start it again. We can renew our life. And the belief, the Jewish belief of Rosh Hashana, is that a human being could renew its life. It's not a determined life that, well, you were born into this family, to this society, to this country. And therefore, the way will behave is already decided by God or by the circumstances, and you cannot change them. No, we have a freedom of choice, and we can change, and we can decide that if we haven't spent enough time with our children last year, we can do this this year. And if we were not paying attention to the needs of our spouses this year, last year, we can change it this year. For me, the belief, the faith that I could renew myself and start something from the beginning, that's the biggest hope for next year.This is the birthday of the world. It's not only the birthday of the world, but it's the birthday of me and you and everybody else all over again.Actually, you touch an amazing, you're actually forcing me to share with you another idea for Rosh Hashana. Rosh Hashana is the beginning of the year. But in the Jewish calendar, it's not the beginning of the year. It's the seventh month. So how did it become the beginning of the year. And the rabbis say that this is the day, and this day is not the creation of the world. It's the creation of the Adam. The first human being to be born was on this Rosh Hashanah. Actually, it's not a Jewish holiday. The ancient rabbis said that our Rosh Hashanah is a universal holiday. Actually, it's related to all human beings because all human beings were created in the shape of God on that day. That means one thing, that for us, this is our birthday as humanity. This is the birthday of dignity for human being. This is the day where we have to ask ourselves, did we dignify people? It's true that we also accept upon ourselves the Kingdom of God on that day. But how do we accept this Kingdom? By understanding that he was creating us and he left in us a part of his image. We were created with the shape of God. Each one of us has a part of the soul that God has left with us. And this part is an integral part of God. So our accepting upon ourselves, the Kingdom of God is actually our understanding that we have a responsibility, that we are created with the image of God. So it You were so right. That's a holiday. And in a holiday, usually we get gifts. But in a holiday, we also look at ourselves and we want to bless ourselves with improving and changing things that we understand that we ought to change in the next years.Rabbi Stav, you know, the phrase that Torah will go forth from Zion, from Zion, all over. For many For our listeners, that's not what they turn to Israel for. They're following what's happening politically. They're following what's happening militarily. They sometimes follow what's happening culturally or artistically or even musically, all of which is wonderful. But for spiritual nourishment, they don't typically turn to Israel because, frankly, what they hear too much from Israel is not spiritually nourishing in any way. I think the opportunity and the privilege of listening to you and learning from you as we our approach to Yimim Nora'im is to actually give new life to that promise of that Torah really can come forth from Zion. When people listen to you and they listen to the religious values that you espouse and that your organization, Zohar, brings to so many people around the country. As you talked about the difference between optimism and hope in rabbi Sacks' model, it gives us not only optimism, but it gives us hope. It's a reminder that Judaism in this country also be reshaped. And people like you are the very, very essence of the a Judaism that would bring dignity, profundity, and I think love to conversations about Jewish life in which they too often are not filled.So you've not only taught us, and I think, equipped each of us to go into the coming days of the Yamim Nora'im, the high holidays, as they're called in English, in our own way, communally, individually, in a better way, but you've also reminded us of the grander of what Torah and Zion can be. And for that, and for all that you do with your life on that score on a day-to-day basis, we are all deeply embedded and enriched by you and your work. I thank you very much for taking the time to have this conversation with us.So let me just take the opportunity to wish all of our, your listeners, a Shana Tovah, Shana Tovah and Metukah, a sweet and a good year. We hope, we know that, please God, it will be a good year. But we urge God that this good year will be also a sweet year because we suffered enough and we can only wish ourselves here in the diaspora a good, gabanched, and sweet year.I'll just add, if I can, there are many different kinds of blessings that we all want and that we all pray for. But I think that it goes without saying that I pray, and you pray, that the next time you and I sit at this table and have a conversation, that every single one of the hostages, those who are still living and those who just need to be returned for a traditional sacred Jewish burial, will be home. And this part of this Jewish nightmare will be behind us, and we can go forward and begin to rebuild all that needs to be rebuilt. Rabbi David Stav, thank you very much for your time and for your soul.Thank you.

MONDAY (today): We look at what’s brewing in the chock-full headlines, plus some glimpses of popular “culture” that give a sense of where Israelis are.

TUESDAY: A recent lengthy Facebook post got a lot of attention, so much so that many responses to the post suggested to the author that he publish it as an article. Whether he will, I don’t know, but I reached out to him to request permission to share it in English with our readers, and he kindly agreed.

WEDNESDAY: With Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur just around the bend, we hear from one of the most important rabbinic voices in Israel, Rabbi David Stav, once a candidate for the position of Chief Rabbi, about how he thinks we ought to be directing our individual and collective thoughts at this pivotal time in Jewish history.

THURSDAY: We return to Israeli music. English is permeating Israeli culture everywhere, and not everyone thinks that’s so great. Hatikva 6, a band whose work we’ve highlighted before, has a song about the “problem,” and we share it with our readers.

Next week, of course, is Rosh Hashanah eve (Monday), Rosh Hashanah (Tuesday and Wednesday) and the Fast of Gedaliah (Thursday). So it’ll be a very short week. We’ll begin on Sunday with a podcast with Iddo Geffen, a fascinating, award-winning Israeli novelist whose newest book has just appeared in English.

And then at the end of the week, we’ll see what’s transpired.

Yesterday afternoon, Sunday, this was the headline on YNet. The amalgam of issues that it raises is a good reminder of the myriad issues Israel’s government and people now face:

LARGE HEADLINE: Getting closer to the decisive moment: a ground invasion alongside the hostages, and a suggestion to leverage the Qatari attack.

SMALLER HEADLINE: As the American Secretary of State is about to reveal the new stances of the USA and Qatar, preparations for Chariots of Gideon B [DG-the name of the new, planned invasion of Gaza City] have been completed and the IDF is at the gates of Gaza. In the meantime, the resistance flotillas are on their way to Gaza and the increasingly hot Judea and Samaria could well escalate. All of this when in the background lies next week’s vote at the United Nations on the creation of a Palestinian State.

The attempt to cut off the head of Hamas’ leadership in Qatar was, perhaps, long overdue, but it was also a spectacular failure. As great a success as was the beeper operation, Qatar was (except for the fascinating technology that Israel used in the attack) worse than a dud.

Israel not only failed to fill anyone who mattered, and not only exposed a deep rift in the security establishment (the Mossad absolutely refused to kill the Hamas leaders on the ground in Qatar), but Israel has also — obviously — enraged Qatar. It has at least annoyed Trump, who sees Qatar as an important ally—and perhaps more than annoyed him. Yes, Qatar has been funding Hamas for years, but it did that with Netanyahu’s express approval, and since October 7, it has been Qatar that has been the intermediary in hostage negotiations.

That role may well be over. Is there anyone else who could assume it? If there isn’t, what happens to the hostages?

That’s the background for this headline on N12, which appeared online at just about the same time that the YNet headline above did — on Sunday afternoon.

LARGE HEADLINE: Qatar’s fury at the United States, and the chances that still remain for a breakthrough in the [hostage] negotiations.

SMALLER HEADLINE: Doha’s attempt to “leverage their humiliation” to get Trump to put more pressure on Israel.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

In the meantime, this post (my thanks to Micaela H Z for her sharp eye in finding it!) is interesting. The post says that the photo was taken in Jerusalem. If you know a bit about Jerusalem and its history, you know that a building with this exterior, not with Jerusalem stone, was one of those buildings that received an exemption from the Jerusalem stone requirement, usually in the early 1950’s, when housing was tight and buildings had to go up quickly.

Sadly, many of those buildings have remained low cost housing and not a lot has been done to them. So here, you can see the pipes added in the intervening decades … presumably some A/C and replaced boilers, etc., all dangling from the side. The clothing hanging outside the window means the family likely doesn’t have a dryer, though that’s not 100% certain.

In any event, what’s really interesting about this photo is the two handwritten signs, the white one above and the brown one below. Here they are, enlarged, with a translation below.

WHITE SIGN: The hostages are still in Gaza because Netanyahu doesn’t want the war to end.

BROWN SIGN: We love our neighbors above 🖤 but the hostages have not returned because Hamas is a barbarian terrorist organization.

One of those cases when both are true. And when Israelis actually manage to engage in some civil discourse, without dissing each other, and without shooting each other.

Finally, though his sordid story hasn’t gotten around outside Israel all that much, Likud Knesset Member Hanoch Dov Milwidsky, who happens to be the Chairman of the Finance Committee, has had some rather unfortunate appearances in the press, and they have nothing to do with finance.

Fortunately for Milwidsky, Israel has a quick news cycle, so the fact that Netanyahu appointed an accused rapist to head the Finance Committee, over the objections of his own Likud MK’s who pleaded with him not to do it, has mostly vanished from the news.

Vanished …. from the news, yes, but not from Israeli social media. The story is sordid and sad, but at least the little skit that made its way around Israeli social media affords a bit of humor (about a not-funny-at-all subject) with which to wrap up today.

Interestingly, and to their great credit, as the crowd was (understandably) fleeing the shooting, a Haredi soldier and another Haredi young man (armed, I’m not sure how) ran towards the terrorists and eliminated them. It was an act of great bravery, expected of soldiers … but still. And a reminder that there’s every reason for Haredim to be in the army. Period.

Later that day, we learned that that same morning four soldiers had been killed in Gaza when their tank went over a mine that had been placed in their way for precisely that purpose. Another reminder of the horrific cost that the continued military assault on Gaza City (which may or may not be the right move—a different issue) will undoubtedly exact.

Which will again raise the question of who’s bearing what burden?

In Israeli jargon, to “carry the stretcher” is to help share the burden of protecting this country. Why? Because one of the milestones of basic training is a long hike (how long and where depends on the unit) in which soldiers carry a stretcher the entire way. “No one gets left behind” — AND everyone has to take a turn carrying the stretcher.

It’s for that reason that this brief clip on Israeli social media got so much attention. It’s a group of Haredi soldiers about to complete a stage of their basic training, with the “stretcher” (literally and figuratively) at the core of the officer’s message.

That was hardly the only clip about and by Haredim that has been making its way around, and today we introduce an important public figure in Israeli circles, Rabbi Dov Halbertal.

Dov Halbertal identifies as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and has held significant positions within the Haredi religious establishment in Israel, including serving as head of the Office of the Chief Rabbi of Israel.

Some of his positions are controversial in larger Israeli society,. Early in Israel’s history, there was bitter disagreement (even more boisterous than the controversy surrounding Haredi service in the IDF) about whether or not women should have any role in the army at all. Though that issue has long since been settled, Halbertal, interestingly, remains a hold-out and continues to argue that women should have very limited roles in the IDF and should not serve in combat units.

But some of his other positions are controversial in, and critical of, Haredi society. The following clips speak for themselves.

The first clip, which was clearly created for social media (though I don’t know where it was first posted), is about as clear an indictment of Netanyahu as anyone has made. That it comes from the Haredi sector makes it particularly interesting.

Those around the world who continue to support Netanyahu (which is fine—that’s politics) should ask themselves, as an indication of how familiar they are with what’s really roiling this society — how many of the names that Halbertal names can they identify, and whether they understand why is he pointing to them …

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Elsewhere, Halbertal opined about the ongoing Haredi demands of the government, and its threats that it will topple the coalition (a threat it has made for years and years with other coalitions, too) if the Haredim do not get what they want.

Halbertal — a Haredi leader — advocates a complete separation of “church” and state, and argues against continued government subsidy of the Haredi community.

There are voices out there, even in the Haredi world, who want something different. What we do not know yet is how much pressure will come bottom-up to force current leadership to care more about people like Dov Halbertal think and say.

Will the heroism of a Haredi soldier this week change the discourse in that community? That’s an issue worth following.

Just walk through the front door of the Niv Nirel Center not far from the gorgeous beach in Michmoret (a bit north of Netanya), and you know you’re in a place that’s very special. It’s hard to explain how you know. Is it the limitless love and embrace that’s in the air? The care with which the new facility has been built and designed? The people’s faces?

Of course, it’s a sad kind of special. The men with canes, on crutches. The occasional wheelchair. Many of them, but not all, accompanied by a woman their age. Wife? Girlfriend? Sister? Hard to know.

But as Kfir Feffer, the psychiatrist who, along with Tami Raviv, is one of our two guests today and one of the key leaders of the Niv Nirel Center said to me as we glanced out the glass door of our room at these men, “You see those crutches? Those injuries will heal. What we’re about is the injuries that you can’t see, the ones that we hope and pray it’s not too late to heal.”

We hear today from Tami Raviv, whose daughter Niv, was killed in her kibbutz on October 7th, along with her boyfriend, Nirel. Niv had hoped to become a therapist, so in her memory, Tami created the Niv Nirel Center, offering world-class PTSD treatment to some of the thousands of soldiers who desperately need it.

The story of her work with Kfir Feffer, her colleague, is one of sadness, determination, love, hope and care. I drove away from the Center after a few hours there moved, and inspired. I hope that their work and their story will inspire you, too.

You can learn more about the Niv Nirel Center on their website, or if you’re inclined, support there work here.

The entrance to the Niv Nirel Center (note the soldier on crutches entering just behind the sigh to the right); a photo of Niv and Nirel, plus signs in their handwriting that greet you upon entering. Two more buildings at the Hadassah Youth Village in Ne’urim that will be added to the Center as soon as they, too, are renovated, and the photo of Niv and Nirel adorning the hardy cactus at the entrance which perhaps says more than whoever placed it there intended.

Tami Raviv is the Founder and Chair of the Niv Nirel Center, Israel’s first comprehensive trauma treatment center. Following the loss of her daughter Niv and Niv’s partner Nirel on October 7th, she transformed her personal tragedy into a mission of healing and resilience. She is also the CEO of Globalcon, a business development company connecting Israel and Japan, and holds a B.A. in Educational Psychology and Sociology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Dr. Kfir Feffer is the Clinical Director and Co-Founder at the Niv Nirel Center, previously served as head of active ward for the treatment of trauma related disorders and crisis intervention at Lev-Hasharon mental health center. He also leads the center of Advanced therapies and neuromodulation and holds an academic position at the faculty of medicine, Tel-Aviv University. He completed his residency in psychiatry at Shalvata mental health center and later continued to clinical fellowship at University of Toronto .

For his professional activity Dr. Feffer awarded the Ministry of health – Directorate of Government Medical centers award for outstanding employee award (2022), the University of Toronto Fellow award (2017), United Health Network, Toronto, Research Award (2017) and the Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology (JSPN) Fellowship Award.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

I'm sitting at a new center, which I'm not even going to say a word about. The people who created it and run it and dreamed it up in response to unspeaking unspeakable tragedy will tell us who they are and why they did it. It's called the Niv Nirel Center. It's in a place called Michmoret. It's on the beach. It's gorgeous here. It's not too far from Netanya for people that want to go on a Google Maps and look for it. It's a very special place. You You walk in, which I did about an hour ago, and you just feel something both unbelievably heartbreaking in the air. You walk in and you look and your heart starts to break. And at the same time, your heart gets filled with a sense of gratitude and inspiration and a sense that this is a very Israeli place in the sense that take the worst possible things that can happen in life and turn them into something that actually brings a tremendous amount of good to people all over Israel.And eventually, I imagine beyond because of what's going to get studied here and learned here and taught here. But that's all I'm going to say. Tami, we're going to start with you. Tell us who you are. Tell us who's sitting next to you. We'll come to you in a second, and then we'll tell the story.Tami RavivOkay, so thank you very much. My name is Tami Raviv. Sitting next to me is Dr. Kfir Feffer, who will introduce himself a bit later. I'll I would say about myself that before October 7th, I had a pretty perfect life, I thought. I'm married, I have three kids. Each one of them is in his own direction. I was happy with everything I had. I had a company that does business development between Israel and Japan. I was actually supposed to fly to Tokyo on the seventh of October at night. It was the first time flying a direct flight to Tokyo. Saturday morning turned my life upside down. On top of everything that happened in Israel, I lost my daughter and her boyfriend, who lived in Kfar Aza. They were renting an apartment just for five months before. They weren't there for very long. They came over to our house on Friday night on Simchat Torah, and they went back home that night. Niv, my daughter, was studying for an exam that takes you from first to second degree in psychology.She wanted to be a therapist, right?Tami Raviv She wanted to be a therapist. And she was just three days before the exam. The exam was supposed to take place on the 10th of October. So she wanted to go home to be in a quiet place. She wanted to go home to be in a quiet place. It was like the last mile before the test. And Saturday morning, everything happened. It took a week for us to know what had happened. For three days, we thought they were stuck in the shelter room and we were just trying to get someone to open it for them.Did they call it all that morning?Tami RavivWe had a very brief conversation at about 7:00. She said everything was okay. They were in the shelter room, and I didn't sense what was going on outside. I don't think they knew at that time what was going outside. At some point, we started to communicate with Nirel on WhatsApp, and he sent out messages. But by the time we understood what was going on, communication fell. Today, we know they jumped out of the window at about 10: 15, and they were both killed immediately. So three days, we thought they were stuck in the shelter Then three more days, we thought they were taken hostage. And then Friday, we were notified that they were identified. First, we got the message, and then Nirel's parents who live on a Moshv on the Gaza envelope, they were notified a few hours later. And after Niv's 30th days of morning, people started to say that we should think of how to commemorate. I didn't really understand what it meant at the time, but I understood. But they said that when someone wants to help, you need to take you need to take the assistance, otherwise you lose it. So I started to think. My husband wasn't ready to be with me to think it at all. So I started to think what I would be best. And people have suggested all kinds of things because Niv really did many things. She was 27 and she managed to do many things. She initiated things, and she volunteered in all kinds of places. But her core personality was to treat. She just touched every person who passed by her. So I thought I needed to go to do something that had treatment in it. Nirel, on top of the fact that he was an amazing guy, he was very severely injured in 2015 in Hebron in the army. He was a commander on a combat unit called Givati, and he had to have resuscitation. At the time, he was a miracle. He came back to life very quickly. He went back to his soldiers, and he wanted an army career. But after five years, he started to have heart failure, and he had to leave the army. When he left the army, he encountered PTSD. It took him time to understand, but when he understood, he went to ask for his rights from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and it was very difficult to get his rights. So he aimed himself. At some point, he took a lawyer, he paid a lot of money, he got his rights, but he aimed himself to be a lawyer to help people get the rights because he said it doesn't make sense that someone needs to fight for something he should get. He had a physical injury and a mental injury, it was something that he deserved, but he never managed to study. So I said, Okay, I'll do treatment with PTSD. And I started my way by myself. And from one person to another, I met Kfir, who was sitting with me, and we started our way together. Maybe I'll let you introduce yourself. And we'll continue from here.Kfir FefferSo thank you for being with us. My name is Kfir, and I'm a psychiatrist. Up until, I would say about eight years ago, I was the manager of an open ward department in a mental health center that mainly focus on crisis intervention and trauma. So I have a lot of experience working with PTSD and on top of that, I'm a commander in a combat reaction unit.What's the combat reaction unit?Kfir FefferStarting from the second Lebanese war, IDF come up with a plan to assist soldiers with acute combat reaction after acute combat situation and give them a treatment right in the spot. We are together with the troops on the front lines, one tacked behind them. Whenever there is an extreme war event, we provide immediate therapy. We are very close to the troops themselves. We do it in the area of where they are currently located. The idea is to give the therapy as soon as possible and to be, as I would say, quick and intense in our support to bring them, again, back to function. This is the idea. During the years, we had a lot of practices to make the whole system working smoothly. But of course, we were not even preparing ourselves to anything, even close to what happened during the Iron sword war. But starting from October 8th, I'm responsible for the northern border. So my unit sits right in the border, and I'm bringing us all back to the first day of the war. We didn't know what to expect. For sure, we didn't know exactly what happened in the day itself in Octobers 7th, but we We were expecting something to happen in the Northern border, so we prepared ourselves. And in the first few days, we just saw troops coming from the South, sharing their story and their again, what they witnessed and feel. We were amazed. Again, it was heartbreaking. It brings to the focus things that we were never thought we're going to hear in this scenario. And one of the heartbreaking thing was that it's not a combat. It's everything that happens in the first days of the war happened in a, most of it in a civilian background, people in their homes, kindergarten, kids, everything. So the exposure was It was not a regular combat exposure. It was, again, much different than what we prepared ourselves. And we see the level of suffering, and we understood that we are dealing with a completely different situation. We had to change the way we work and create a different platform of intervention. For example, usually our interventions, it's mainly for a few hours, intense, but for a few hours. But the stories, the combat itself took so many hours, sometimes more than 36 hours in a row. In the modern history of war, there is nothing like it. When we're talking about combat situations, usually it's a matter of seconds or minutes, not hours or few hours. Here there's so much to go through and so much to discuss. The level of was something, again, beyond imagination. You had so much to work. We understood that we can do it in a time frame of a few hours. Then we need much more than this. We created some short term hospitalization that they stay with us for two, three days that we can deliver much more intense intervention. But we weren't ready for that prior. That's what I did for the first few weeks. As And then they asked for volunteers to go and see what's going on with the soldiers of mainly Golani that survived October 7h within the army posts surrounding the Gaza envelope. Of course, they survived. Those who I meant to see survived October 7h, but no one knew what's going on with them. They just took their weapons away, of course, so they won't commit suicide or or anything like it.They took everybody's weapons away?Kfir FefferYeah. They just sent them home. They tell them, Okay, we don't know now. We don't have the infrastructure to help you right now. Again, I'm not judging. It was a complete chaos. But stay with your family at home. We will contact you soon.And give us your gun.Kfir FefferAnd give us your gun, yeah.That means that they were worried already.Kfir FefferYeah, of course. Everybody knew what What happened that day. Again, we think we know. Even today, we are not exposed to all the images, stories. Again, some of the events are, again, beyond imagination. A human being cannot capture what happened during this day. I would just say that my brother, maybe after two weeks, came to one of the kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope, and he had to sleep in what used to be a kindergarten.He was in the army at that point.Kfir FefferYeah, in the reserves as well. So all the beds were ready for the kids because this was Simchat Torah, so it was a day off, but the day after was the first day of kindergarten after a long break. So the kindergarten was ready. And that was the moment that he himself just fall to tears. Because, again, It's not always the horrific frames. Sometimes it's the regular frames in a horrific situation that surrounds it. Anyways, I started to see the soldiers that survived October 7th in their homes. And by the time, I thought, I know everything there is to know about post-trauma. I learned my lesson from the first few days and the first few weeks of this war.Again, I was exposed to many stories, and I thought, again, I'm mastering it. Nothing to worry. And I remember my schedule for the first day. So I made an appointment with a soldier for an hour, commuting for the next place, half an hour, another hour, committing half. I had three or four meetings on the first day. I did only one. I had to cancel the rest because, again, nothing in my professional life prepared me to what I witnessed during those visits.Can you just tell us what you did professionally before the war? I mean, aside from your reserve duty responsibilities.Kfir FefferI was the manager of an open ward department that focuses on crisis intervention and trauma. Not necessarily for soldiers.Kfir FefferPeople of all sorts. Most of them were sexual trauma, but some of them during the years, we had veterans as well.Open ward means it's not residential. They come for the day.Kfir FefferIt's residential, but they come from their own will. It's an open ward, you can go home whenever, but you stay in. It's an inpatient work. On top of that, I'm in charge of new technologies in psychiatry. I have my unit for advanced therapies, which involves technology and use of psychedelics in psychiatry. This is what I did prior. Again, I'm working in the field of trauma for many years. Theoretically, I knew everything in the books. But again, this is what we just experienced. It's not in the books. Not in the But not from the combat perspective, not from the trauma perspective, and I must say not even from the social perspective. So what Israel is going through in the last two years, again, we are still in the surge of the events. But we are not capturing still the full picture, what will be the social consequences? The the adverse ones and the positive ones. I'm just going back to the story. I went for the first house, and I found a soldier that it was two and a half months after the start of the war. So we're speaking early December. All the symptoms of PTSD were very vivid. He didn't sleep for most of the time, at night, especially. So his grandma came to be with him because she's not sleeping at night. So she said, I'm not sleeping anyways. At least he will not be alone. I found out very quickly that I was not ready to what I'm going to see and hear. Everything in this war is captured. They had footages of sometimes from three different perspectives, their own, from their own cell phones, sometimes from the Nukhba terrorists, and sometimes surveillance camera of the posts themselves. So some of them have a lot of data they want to share, but no one came to ask them about it. So again, the level of exposed from my end was enormous, but the need and the level of suffering was, again, something that I wasn't ready to meet. I would say that the effect on the families You know that in PTSD, the family that serves as a main source of support, usually takes a lot of the responsibility, but you are not expecting to find PTSD symptoms within the families. We understood that we are dealing with a completely different situation. Most importantly, that the current system, health system, mental health system in Israel, that even prior to October 7th was under staffed and budgets were very limited, we are not ready to deliver relevant therapies to this situation.I just want to make sure that people understand what you said. This is like an unheard of situation where it's not only the soldier himself, sometimes herself, but usually himself, who had the PTSD, but it wasn't the family that was offering support. The family itself had symptoms of PTSD, which is basically unheard of in the field.Kfir FefferBecause for an example, the footage that I had to see, they shared with their families. They don't have the capacity to work with it. They don't have prior knowledge. They don't have support system back then. Maybe today it's a bit better situation, but they had no one to ask for help, no one to guide them what to do, no one to guide them how to help their loved ones. So the effects were enormous. And now I want to take us to the another step because it's not just the patients and their families or the veterans and their families The numbers are so huge that the effect on society.What are the numbers?Kfir FefferI want to be very conservative and to say that we are talking about 12% of those who participate in the combat situation.That's half a million people that were in the combat situation.Kfir FefferMaybe the numbers are a bit less than this because we're talking about civilians and soldiers. I'm talking about army veterans, so let's talk about 200,000. If you're going to be very, very conservative, you're talking about new PTSD patient around 20 to 30 thousands. The system, prior to October 7th, is designed to treat about, let's say, 1800s. So we're talking about numbers that at least 10 times the full capacity of the system currently. If you're reading the news, in the last few weeks, people are starting to speak more loudly about suicidality. It's, of course, a huge problem because, again, the level of service that these people need is, I would say, supposed to 360 degrees of support for their own, their families. And again, it's a social component as well. And as you can see around you, most of the people who are Here are not just mentally injured. Some of them are physically injured as well. And I would say that here, about 90% of the patients that, again, their most severe injury is a mental injury, suffers from for physical disabilities as well. The connection between these two dots is, again, another very important, I would say, challenge for the system that, again, wasn't ready to deal with. It takes us back to the point that I met Tami because after the first round of reserves, I came back to my supervisor. He's an important part of what's going on here because he enabled me to, I told I cannot go to my everyday work. We need to be able to do something specific in the field of PTSD for veterans. He gave me his blessing and two days a week to create the infrastructure for this place. And a week afterwards, I met with Tami, and from there on, we are hand-to-hand.Tell us about the place, Tami.Tami RavivMaybe I'll say that our collaboration allowed my thoughts to have a very professional infrastructure. I think it allowed Kfir's ideas to be able to come out of the hospital scenery.And to meet people in other settings.Tami RavivTo be in another setting like where we are. People can't see where we are, but we're just overlooking the ocean. We're sitting on a cliff that you can near the waves. And we're in a youth village. We found this place. Everything that happened to us just, we say, happened like a miracle. The way we met each other, the way we found this place and the way it came together just happened.Can you tell us just a bit before we go on further about this place? What is it? What happens here? How many people are you treating? What percentage of the people who turn to you, do you actually have the capacity to treat? Just give us the basic rundown of what's going on. We can even hear them outside the door. I don't know if it's picking up on the microphone. If it is, it's totally fine. It's actually like holy sounds of people coming to become better. But tell us what's happening in the hallways and the rooms here.Tami Raviv The idea is to give all the services under one roof. It means that we give the one-on-one therapy. We've got, of course, Kfir, which is in Israel, a unicorn. To have a psychiatrist on board is really very unique. Of course, we give a psychiatry support. We have treatment, touch therapy, because we know that a lot of the trauma is caught in the body. To help ground and to help release tension from neck, shoulders, back.That's with families also, right? Some of the touch therapy?Tami Raviv Touch therapy for now is only for the patients. We have movement therapy for people who can just need to release their attention through movement. It's yoga. It's sensitive for trauma. And we do give support to the family. So we have one-on-one, it's not one-on-one, but sessions for family intervention for the parents and for the spouses.There's a lot of use of technology here, too. But I think when people think therapy, they think a couch and a chair and a very skilled professional listening and talking, which is obviously a critical part of it. But there's technology. You see it in all these rooms. When I see boxes new equipment that have just arrived that have not been unpacked yet. What's all this technology stuff?Kfir Feffer It goes back to my career prior to October 7th. I'm dealing a lot with technology in psychiatry. The fact that we are a high tech country, now we are a PTSD country, we need to bring them both together. We have a lot of companies that want to cooperate and deliver new options for treatment for PTSD.Israeli companies, foreign companies, both?Kfir FefferMost of them are Israeli. Some of them are not Israeli. Some of them are from the US, for example. I can give a few examples.I think people will be very interested in knowing, like when they hear therapy or PTSD and then technology, it sounds like it doesn't fit in the same sentence.Kfir Feffer For example, one of the things is taking an existing technology and just to make the adjustments for PTSD. For example, neurostimulation, which is a way to treat mental disorders without pharmaceutical intervention. It's basically use of magnetic fields, the same that we use for MRI. We do it for many years in depression.How's it applied? Are they in a machine?Kfir Feffer It's a machine that, it's like a helmet. It goes on your head and deliver a magnetic pulses for about 20 minutes. Again, it's something that we use for depression for many years now, maybe for almost three decades. But the technology is like our cell phones. We are now maybe in the second generation. We are able to text and we're able to make calls. But again, there is a whole world behind this type of therapies. What we do now is we adjusting it to treat PTSD. It's a bit different areas of the brain, and you need a different intervention to support it, but we do it here. We aim to help PTSD with one of the most debilitating symptoms, which is sleeping disorders. We know that if you treat a PTSD patient and you don't help him with the sleeping problems, then even the benefits are short-lived. We know that this is a core aspect of well-being. We cooperate with a lot of, at least now, four companies that has some technology that helps with with sleeping. They were not aiming first for helping PTSD, but we adjusted their technologies for our needs. Two of them, for example, one that you can have a home-based sleeping lab that you can take home with you.In the morning when you wake up, I get all the information for my cell phone, so I know where we are starting, and I can keep a track and whether my is helping and in what? In regards to sleep. Another company, this is one of the US-based companies, is a company that, for example, we know that in PTSD, people find it very hard to come down and to fall asleep. There is a phase before you're falling asleep that your thoughts are becoming a bit more weird and loose. People with PTSD doesn't reach this point. The company that we're working with is creating, what they're doing is, practically, is playing your own brain, playing music to fit your own brain. If my idea is to bring you to a stage of falling asleep, what they helped me with the technology is to create the music that will bring you what we call Delta waves, that are the waves that are very important for the sleeping process. So they helped me get it to the patient and help him to fall asleep.I just want to ask you a question not about PTSD for a second and not about the Niv Nirel Center, just an Israeli social question. My impression informally, and I'm not a professional in this at all, but my impression informally is that sleep issues have now become an enormous social problem in Israel. Is that buttressed by data? I mean, are we prescribing many more sleeping pills now than we were three years ago?Kfir Feffer You can see from the Ministry of Health that the prescribed medication for sleep, there is a surge in use. But it's very, I would say, understandable because just taking into account two years of continuous stress, alarms during the night, sirens, the war with Iran right now, the level of stress that we had deal with in the last two years. Again, if we have wrote this story two years ago, no one will buy the book because it's too weird.It's just too outlandish.Kfir Feffer Yeah. But this is the reality now. We have, as a society, we are practically very adjustable. But again, there is a price that we are paying. One of the prices are sleeping problems. The other one you see with depressive symptoms and anxiety, mainly anxiety. There are a lot of prices that Israeli society is paying. But I want to also point that whenever you are experiencing such adverse times and challenges, when you survive them, there is also a winning aspect, right? It's very important for me to share that I'm working with the youngsters in Israeli society for the last two years, this is practically what I'm doing. Most of them are between the age of 20 to 35. The fact that they're going to be the leaders of our country in the years to come, it brings me a lot of hope.Tell me why.Kfir Feffer Because as psychiatrist, I have a lot of colleagues around the world, and we are a people that travel and understand and visit other societies. We see what's going on in the young generation, especially about being more self-absorbed and more worried about myself, very subjective.You're saying that it's around the world in general?Kfir Feffer The Western world. We are speaking about a generation that's putting Sometimes the subject is the most important thing. And what we just witnessed in the last two years is how a generation that we didn't have a lot of expectation from the top generation. How they are amazingly came together. And what's going on right now, for example, in the center, prior to the opening day, this was a completely derelict building. We decided that we're going to start right away in April of 2024. The first day, we opened our doors for patient in just four years, just a year from now. August 18th was the first day of operation. We had four months to make this place look like this.It's unbelievably beautiful. People can't see it, but there's a lot of building going on that it's getting more and more. But It's an unbelievably beautiful place. The ocean is gorgeous and all that, but the rooms are gorgeous. You feel like you've walked into a very high class clinic. And a lot of that time, you said, was donated. I mean, not all of it, but a lot of it, right? I mean, doors and air conditioners and electric. Tami Raviv All the furniture here, what you see was donated. Everything. The bulbs, the paint, the colors, the brushes, everything. The furniture, everything was donated.These are what? These are companies who donated it or they're individuals who donated? We got air conditioners.Tami Raviv No, the companies.And you just went to them and asked them?Tami Raviv I think people went to ask. It wasn't a direct request. As Kfir started to say, at the beginning, people just came and volunteered. The actual work here in this place was done by volunteers. So they went back to their companies or to their units in the army. And this is how it went from word of mouth to people that this place is coming together.So it actually is not only supporting the patients and their families, but the people who are volunteering are also, it sounds like, getting something that's very helpful for them to cope with the horrible time that we're in.Kfir Feffer I think that the social aspects we are speaking all the time about the three levels, the personal level, the family level, and the social level. And coming here and see people, soldiers on the week off during the war, came as a unit to volunteer here, and because they knew that one of their friends need help, and this is the way that they could bring him here.What did soldiers volunteer to do here?Tami Raviv They actually painted the walls. They worked physically. They put together the grass, the gardening.They're coming back from combat, and they have a week off, and what do they want to do with their week? They want to come here and work in this place. That's just such an Israeli story.Kfir Feffer I want to point out something. It's important for me because some of the troops that worked here, they knew that they have someone within them that needs help. They didn't want to send him to a place. Again, in the Israeli society, mainly when you're in a combat unit, asking for help for PTSD, it's not something that you easily do. I think this was one of their ways.The soldier who needed help came with the group and saw the place.Kfir Feffer Yeah, and they saw who are the people around here. They make him feel comfortable because he's part of the place already. And the first few patients that we saw, it was more or less the same story. Units that came here, some Some of them directly, some of them because they came and they had someone in a close circle that they knew that need help.What's the order? I mean, what's the size? How many people are getting treated here? Just give us that data?Tami Raviv We just have a bit over 150 patients.Who come once a week, every day?Tami Raviv Each one has his own treatment plan. We really tailor it to their needs. Just very important to say that 30% are women.30% of the patients are women.Tami Raviv 30% of the patients are women. This is very unique.They were soldiers? They were partners of soldiers?Tami Raviv For now, the patients were all soldiers. Their trauma is from the army.So there are women soldiers who have PTSD.Tami Raviv Yeah. They don't have to be combat, not fighters, but they sometimes to support combat, fighting. Some of them have very harsh stories of identifying bodies. Some were just, how do you say Tazpitaniyot?They were the lookouts on the computer screen. So they were basically abandoned. I mean, just completely. So you have about 150 people here now are getting treatment of some sort. Is it a waiting list?Kfir Feffer This is including the supporting circles. So this is just the core patients. There are, again, three circles.You're also working with their families?Kfir Feffer Yes.Tami Raviv So we're giving support to the parents and the spouses. For now, most of the people don't have children, or if they have children, they're very young because the ages that come here for now are mostly between 20 to 30. We do have some people that are coming from that are older We have a few from Yom Kippur war that they said for 50 years, they managed to hold it in. And then after the 7th of October, it was a trigger to events that they encountered, and they couldn't hold it in anymore. So we have a few from Yom Kippur. But most of the people are between 20 to 30. And as I was talking about the women, we're writing new protocols to treat women because there's nothing in the writing, nothing in the books that talks about women that encounter trauma. You want to elaborate about this?Kfir Feffer I would just say that we have a very close collaboration with friends in the US, in the VA, and in Mount Sinai, and Colombia. And so we have a very close collaboration. And as you always do, when you're creating your service, you want to understand all the record information possible. On combat PTSD among women, there is very limited data. So everything that we are doing here, again, we are pioneers in the field. Not just in this specific aspect, but I want to say that the first patient here was a female because we knew, a female patient because we knew we're going to propose a program for a female with PTSD. We are now about to publish the data of the first 100 patients that we saw here and what are the unique manifestation of PTSD among women. This is also part of our obligation to spread the knowledge because we don't want to be an island. We need to have a lot of centers like us in the country. I'm thinking that the model that we are creating here can be replicable in other places also.You mentioned to me, we'll come back to it in a second. I want to hear something about the vision because when you were taking me to the other building, you showed me this large area that's going to be, I don't know if it's an auditorium or a convention place, but then you said over here is going to be the research center. I remember you pointed to an area that's just being built now. So give us the vision of the place, I don't know, for the long run, but for the immediate around the corner. In other words, two, three, four years from now, what's your hope in terms of the numbers of people that you're going to be serving? Who's it going to reach out to? Who's going to do research? Where's the research going? Just give us some of this. This is obviously, as we say here, it's the. This is just in the very early stages. It's like the diaper stage. It's just off the ground. It's amazing. But where is it headed?Tami Raviv We're now literally closing the first year. We're opening very soon, hopefully in two weeks or maybe one week. The intensive daycare for people who will come with more severe symptoms and will come for three full days and work in a group for 10 weeks. And then they will fit in to continue, hopefully, less intensive care. And we're now working to build what you said, the convention Center for the continuation of treatment because for now we're giving six months, which are very intense, but it ends, and they want to continue, and we feel they need to have a community here. We're building now, hopefully it will start very soon, a continuation treatment that will allow them to continue to come every once in a while to fit in a group. So hopefully, by the end of '26, we hope to have the whole building renovated and working. And by that time, we're planning to have about 1,000 to 1,200 patients per year.At any time, at per year. Tell me something just about PTSD of this sort in general. These people that are going to be treated for life, are they going to need support for life? That's my first question. And my second question is, because you mentioned the societal implications before, and you said that this generation gives you a tremendous amount of hope, which is counterintuitive, right? I mean, you wouldn't necessarily think that looking at such a traumatized, quote, unquote damaged generation would give you hope. But I want to ask you, first, do people, because I don't know anything about this, really, do people who suffer this grievous PTSD need to be treated for life? And second of all, say something about Israeli society. I mean, I know it's not directly related to the Niv Nirel Center, but it's a society in trauma. I'm in my late 60s, so maybe I won't be around. But when my children and grandchildren, my grandchildren, who are all less than 10, are parents, and they're raising their own children. What's going to be the implication in Israeli society of these years? If you had to guess, and obviously you don't know, but you're a psychiatrist, so what's your sense?So start first with, do people need trauma, do they need treatment for the rest of their lives and then the implications for society?Kfir Feffer So even the first question, I will separate into two different questions. So the first part will be whether people with PTSD in the long term have the same trajectory? And of course, the answer is no. Some of them after the intense therapy, and we see it already now because, again, we have a few dozens of patients that already concluded the treatment. Some of them, They went back to their normal life. They are very thankful for what they got here, but I'm not sure that they need us. At least they don't need us now. Some of them, I would say it's about 50/50. You can sense that they need additional push in the back. The idea behind this place, the next step, is to create here the center will be a hub for them for whatever their needs will be. It might be that for the next two years, they just need to come for social events. They create some community. But we know that for some of them in the long term, that there are times of worsening of the symptoms. I don't want them to start all over again. I want them to be part of something with very easy access to therapy and treatment with people who know them, but they feel comfortable. They know exactly what they can get. So we don't have to start everything from scratch. So the idea behind the next level of this program is to create a community. And again, I'm not sure that it will be for everyone, but I'm expecting it to be relevant for at least 50% of patients. And based on the beauty of the place, people, I want to say that the staff here is amazing.When you walk in the door, you feel quality. You feel love, I have to say.Kfir Feffer This is Tami.Okay, say it. It has nothing to do with me. When you walk in the door, you just feel, I don't know. There's no really English word for "Echpatiyt", that just a sense of caring is the oxygen in here. You just saw people were talking and interacting with a, I saw, but right when I walked in the door, there was clearly a veteran soldier, and a woman was with him, his girlfriend, his wife. I have no idea. But you just made everybody react. I mean, just you could see this is a place, it's safe, it's high quality, it's beautiful, it's peaceful. The ocean is here. There's something about just being in here that heals the soul, even if, like me, you're very fortunate that you're not dealing with that. So there's a tremendous amount of quality, a tremendous amount of beauty. And that's part of the vision of this place, too, I think, plus the unbelievably high quality care that they're getting.Kfir Feffer I think that this is also why you asked the question about treatment and then about the effect on society, because, again, our aim is to create here a community that's part of the services coming from the community around us. We have a lot of support from the community around us. This is what the uniqueness of Israel, I think nowadays, it's all about. We can fight with each other on a lot of things.And we do.Kfir Feffer And we do. And we will continue. But when it comes to caring for each other, this is something I believe is very unique. And again, we were fearful that with the generations, with the next generation, it will maybe fade out and will be less salient. But we do feel that there is something in this generation that is not willing to give up, not on the country, not on being together, not about including minorities. Look what happened in the last year or two with the Druze, and we had a meeting a week ago because we have a program for minorities. This is a different story. It's still a challenge, right? PTSD and mental problems within minorities groups in Israel is a challenge. But one of the veterans we spoke with, he said, In the last two years, the Druze had came to a clear decision about their identity. Even the fraction of the Druze community that were living in the Golan Heights, they have families in Syria. They had a very hard time to find their path within the Israeli society. We are experiencing a change. So it comes from both sides, right? They took the decision, but it's because of actual deeds to become more closely related with the Israeli society. And I think that the Israeli society is doing the same thing within its inclusion of other groups. It wasn't always a clear path.Which is one of the things, I guess, that gives you hope.Kfir Feffer And again, this This is one of the positive side effects of war, that you as a society, need to take decision to make changes. This is what we see here from our perspective.To me, it's very compelling that you come to a place on theory, tremendous brokenness. But, Tami, you've taken the ultimate horror and transformed, your life will, of course, always be changed. And the sadness never goes away. But the transformation that you've brought to so many other people as a way of making your daughter's memory something forever is, I think, a very Israeli step. And for me, what you're saying is that this is a very traumatized society. But ironically, that trauma is going to be a source of strength and cohesiveness internally, but also to minorities and other people beyond. That's, I think, we need reasons to feel hope, and we need reasons to believe in the future. And I'll just say as somebody who, I'm new to this place, and I'm grateful to my friend, Doron, who's sitting behind me, who said, you can interview them over the phone, but you really should come. And he was a thousand percent right. It's unbelievably inspiring. And the news is so horrible, politically, militarily, emotionally, socially. It's just so horrible that to come to a place like this that is just quality, love, caring, and rebuilding. It is the embodiment, it seems to me, of what this whole country has to do.I know that you're in the middle of a very busy day, and you took time out, and you can hear all the activity going on outside the door here. First of all, obviously, for all of us, our heart goes out to you for the horror that nobody who has not been through it can really understand. But to the two of you who have taken one of the worst periods of Israel's history, perhaps the worst period of Israel's history, and transformed it into an oasis of hope and inspiration and building again on behalf of all of us in the country and out of the country who deeply believe in this place and who desperately wanted to be a great place for our children and our grandchildren. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for who you are and thank you for what you do.Tami Raviv Thank you. I just want to add two sentences. First, I want to say about Kfir that he's too modest to say that he left the management of the ward and he's now our Clinical Manager of the Niv Nirel Center. And he brought his hospital to give the clinical support. So we're privileged to have a mental health hospital support to such a place. And we're also privileged to have the support of the Federations of the United States, the JFNA, that supported the Ministry of Health financially, and we're getting the support through the hospital. And of course, the support of many Americans. I don't know who's listening, so I hope people who've been listening. Some of them have supported us. So just to say thank you. And we hope to grow and create what we're planning because we feel like there's a lot of support also from the Israeli side that understand the need and are here to help us. So thank you for this opportunity.To help you as you're helping others, which is basically what this is all about. Thank you both very, very much.

SUNDAY (today): two videos of recovery that have gone viral in Israel, one receiving more than 2,000,000 views in a tiny country.

MONDAY: While we were sitting in our safe rooms as Israel attacked Iran, for some, it was a moment in which new dreams were sparked. We hear about the hopes and feelings of Israelis who once called Iran home. TUESDAY: Sarah Hurwitz, once the speechwriter for Michelle Obama, has a new book coming out. And she explains why she had to give Israel a place in this book which is so different from her previous (excellent) book.

WEDNESDAY: After Tami Raviv’s daughter, Niv, was murdered in her kibbutz on October 7, her friends told her that the only way to renew her life would be to create something in Niv’s image. What has emerged, the Niv-Nirel center, is extraordinary.

THURSDAY: As war in Gaza City looms, the issue of the Haredi draft is getting a lot of heat again. And one Haredi leader has a very surprising message. Plus, some Haredim are getting drafted, and we see them.

We are focus on two remarkable stories of recovery, we begin with the story of Ari Spitz, who was grievously wounded in Gaza, and lost both legs and one arm. But being left with but one arm did not stop him. The first video was posted half a year ago as he worked doggedly on his recover, the second (which we didn’t subtitle — it’s thanks to all the various staff members at the hospital) is of him as he’s about to be released from Tel HaShomer Hospital after 281 days.

If this is not heroism, I don’t know what is.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

The following clip has had some 2.5 million views, so far. Think about that number for a second. In a country of 10 million people, most Arabs are not watching videos about soldiers with PTSD (of course, some are). That leaves 8 million people. Haredim are 15% of Israel’s population, and most of them are not watching this. That leaves 6.5 million people. Just under a fifth of Israeli society is under 10 years old, and those kids are likely not watching videos about PTSD.

All of which is a way of saying that 2.5 million hits is a HUGE number—this video has touched a deep, raw nerve in Israel. I hardly know anyone who hasn’t seen it.

Udi Kagan is one of my very favorite Israeli comedians—and I’m hardly alone. If you’re not familiar with him, you’ll soon see why he’s all the rage in Israel. He’s an extraordinary talent.

Here’s his Facebook page. Here’s his YouTube page. And his Instagram page.

Kagan is hilarious, but what makes him very special is the degree to which his comedy is almost always an incisive commentary on Israeli society—the parts we’re proud of and the parts we’re not. It’s not all war or politics, either. He writes about raising kids, marriage, the hippy scene where he lives: the whole gamut. I could listen to him for hours, and laugh (or tear up) time and again.

Kagan has starred in and created several TV shows, including the acclaimed series "Messiah," which ran from 2013 to 2020, and has also contributed as a writer to hit programs like "Carpool Karaoke Israel" and "Back of the Nation". He’s also contributed to Israel’s rough equivalent of Saturday Night Live, Eretz Nehederet.

In all the years we’ve been doing this column, I cannot recall a single clip that’s gone viral in Israel that so many people have written me to say, “you HAVE to share this with your readers.” It’s long, and thus a lot of work for our staff to subtitle, so I resisted a bit. However, the requests continued to come in, so here it is.

Kagan’s performance here, in a Tel Aviv club, is a beautiful, moving glimpse into what much of this generation of Israelis is going to carry with them as long as they grace the planet.

In Israel, the same battles rage, but with a twist. Is liberalism really Jewish? Or is it a Christian idea that has somehow insinuated itself into the heart of what should be a more authentically Jewish state?

Until October 7th put the judicial reform project to (temporary) rest, the battles over individual rights, the independence of the judiciary, the freedom of the press were the main source of discussion when one mentioned Israel.

The issue of liberalism or something-else hasn’t gone away in Israel—it’s just gone a bit quiet until the war is over, until there’s a judicial crisis or until there are elections. But even while seemingly dormant, the intellectual clashes continue. As Tomer Persico explains in our conversation today—and in his new book which he describes for us—people like Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir and others are basically making a claim about the very essence of Jewish views of society and government. They suggest, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not, that liberalism is a fundamentally Christian implant onto a Jewish society and it’s time to revert to more authentically Jewish values.

Nothing could be further from the truth, argues Persico. And in today’s conversation about his book, one of a series of new Israeli books on liberalism, freedom and individual rights that Persico edits, he explains what is at stake and argues for a reading of Judaism which places liberal values front and center.

Dr. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Chief Editor of the ‘Challenges of Democracy’ book series for the Rubinstein Center at Reichman University, and a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Persico was the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies for three years and has taught for eight years in Tel Aviv University. His fields of expertise include the liberal order, Jewish modern identity, Contemporary Spirituality and Jewish fundamentalism.

His first book, The Jewish Meditative Tradition (Hebrew) was published by Tel Aviv University Press in 2016, and his second book, In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea was published by Yedioth in 2021, and will soon be published by NYU Press in 2025. His third book, Liberalism: its Roots, Values and Crises (Hebrew) was published by Dvir in 2024.

Tomer also has his own blog in English, which you can find in this link.

Tomer Persico’s book In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea in is available on Amazon

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

Over the past two years of war, of tragedy in virtually every direction that one can possibly look, what's happened to Israelis, what's happening and not happening with the hostages, what's happening on the Gaza side of the border, and everywhere one turns. It's easy to forget that Israel is a country and a society that has much more going on than politics and war. But the truth of the matter is that what makes Israel an extraordinary place, and what makes Israel, one of the things, at least, that makes Israel such a wonderful place to live, is the intellectual foment, the energy here in the academy and far beyond the walls of the academy, that make this really as a society of ideas. There are lots of different pockets of ideas here. There are people in the sciences, and there's people in tech, and there's people in the humanities, and so on and so forth. Then there's a group of people, among many, many other talented groups, who I think try to bridge the world of Jewish religious thinking, Jewish traditional classical thinking, with the cutting-edge ideas in the West. To my mind, one of the people who has always been outstanding at this, and who whenever I see him in a paper or a magazine, wherever I immediately read, is Tomer Persico.Officially, Tomer Persiko is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and a senior research scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle East Studies. He's the author of several books, including the Jewish meditative tradition in Hebrew, and liberalism: Its Roots, Values, and Crisis, which is in Hebrew. We're going to talk today about a new book of his that's come out from NYU Press, an expanded version, a significantly extended version, actually, of the book that I just mentioned in English called In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea. I'm not going to do justice to all of Tomer's impact on the intellectual class in Israel, but he's really quite widely recognized as a person of enormous intelligence, profound thinking, a person who cares deeply about the liberal tradition and the way in which it's finding and not finding at the same time, a home in a contemporary Israeli political and intellectual discourse. Tomer and I saw each other not that long ago, actually, at a conference at Tel Aviv University at the Rabin Center, which was celebrating a new book about the. What was it called? The Retreat of Democracy?Yeah. About populism and extremism and how they feed off each other.And one of the authors of that book is Yaniv Roznai, who's actually been on the podcast before speaking about judicial reform. And I saw Yaniv at the conference, of course, and he readily agreed to come back on and talk to us about his new book. But that whole series is being edited by Tomer Persico. So he's got his fingers in a lot of pies and always with a great quality. And given the fact that in the Western world, everywhere one turns, certainly in the United States and in Israel, but far beyond, one can see in Europe and South America as well, some of the central ideas that have shaped Western civilization, and certainly, Western democracies for several generations now are very much under attack. This felt like a really important moment to have Tomer talk to us, first of all, about the ideas themselves. And then we'll talk about Israel in light of what's changing, and how it's changing in Israel, how it's not changing in Israel, how optimistic he might be that we can keep that going in Israel and so forth. So Tomer on a very, very, very hot, and I don't know if it's called it cloudy, but it looks like there's huge fires outside of Jerusalem, but I don't think there are. You can look like you can cut the air. The air is gray. I don't know what it is, but in any event, it's gross. I'm glad that we're inside in an air-conditioned office. Thank you so much for taking the time.Daniel, thank you for your very, very kind words. Thank you for having me.It's really, really a delight. Tell us a little bit about this really extraordinary book, which focuses on five themes: Selfhood, Freedom, Conscious, Equality, and Meaning. But really, through those five concepts, you do a history of the West. It's an intellectual history of the West. There's a lot of people. I said to my wife last night, there's a lot of young people that are coming out of the army now. I think this is a terrible thing, but she doesn't think so, who are unbelievably talented. The army taught them how to code in the most cutting-edge ways. They come out, they come from families where it was obvious you're going to college. This is not a question. All of a sudden, they can earn more in the marketplace than they're going to be able to justify not doing. So they skip college. They go right into the world of tech. Then I was saying to my wife just the other day, we were talking about this, Well, how are these kids going to get an education? And of course, the truth of the matter is that the world is a very different place than it was when I went to college. Even when you went to college. There are ways for autodidacts to learn a lot that they didn't used to have, there are AI and the Internet. But I would say, even though I'm very much encouraging people to go to college still, if one wanted to do one or two books that really trace some of the critical ideas that have shaped Western civilization, this would be one of the many books that I would point to that I think has done a really amazing job. So tell us about the idea of the book, where it came from, and why you wrote it, and what it says.I mean, as you said, it's an intellectual and cultural history of the West through the prism of the idea that all humans were created in the image of God. When I started researching this, I was actually surprised that no such book had been written because you think, This is such a fundamental idea. It's chapter one in Genesis. Obviously, somebody is going to write how this influenced Western tradition, Jewish tradition, Christian tradition, Christendom, whatever, Europe, something. But no such book has been written. Okay, I picked up the glove and really tried show how this is a seminal idea in the development of the West, in the development of selfhood, of conscience, of liberty, as you just read, of equality. This begins with Antiquity, in which the image of God really comes to establish an individuality that was not there in other cultures. Think of yourself as an organ of a wider network, your tribe, your clan, your ethnic group. The image of God makes every individual not only equal to every other individual because everyone was created in the image of God, we are fundamentally essentially equal, but it makes people significant. It makes individual life meaningful.Every person is a whole world onto itself, the Mishna says. Not only equality, that is such much an important contribution, which really establishes a individuality that is translated immediately to laws in the Bible. If you compare biblical laws to Mesopotamian laws, Babylonian or a Syrian, and Acadian, et cetera, you can see clear differences. I'll give one example. In all of Mesopotamia, and indeed in the Hellenistic world, you could first of all, trade life for money. If somebody kills somebody, you can pay in order for them not to be punished by death on the one side. On the other side, People would be punished for the sins of others. If I would kill a son of a certain party of families, of a patriarch, of a head of a household, my son would be killed. No, my son didn't do anything. He's not connected to the deed in any way. But he would be killed because he's the equivalent of measure for measure. He's the equivalent of the place that the other patriarch's son holds in the scheme of the family.Well, eye for eye, leg for leg. Yeah, but a son for a son. Our tradition explained that differently.Exactly. We You have the Bible, you have Genesis saying, you have the Deuteronomy saying, sons will not be punished for the sins of their fathers. Fathers will not be punished for the sins of their sons. Each will be punished for their own sin. This is a straight-off contradiction of Hammurabi laws, of Assyrian laws. The Bible is arguing with them. The prophets are saying, Father ate unripe fruits, and the tease of the sun will be hardened. No, no, of course not. The Bible places each individual as a world unto themselves as significant, and so the law changes. And what I show in the book is that when this idea gets picked up by Christianity, that becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire, that becomes a universal religion, and indeed today the most widespread and biggest religion in the world, when this idea gets picked up, it, of course, changes. It, of course, mutates in different directions, but at the end, it influences the laws that we today legislate, just as the biblical laws were influenced. It produces, not in a deterministic way, but it produces the liberal order which today we hold so dear. I mean, not in a deterministic way is saying, it's not that if you plant the idea of the image of God 3,000 years ago in some culture, 3,000 years later, you'll get the liberal order. It's not so simple. Obviously, there are a lot of other conditions that come into play, material conditions, cultural conditions. But even if it's not a sufficient condition, it is perhaps a necessary condition for the liberal order. And indeed, no other culture which does not have the idea of all people created in the image of God, produced rights discourse, respect for of the individual above, democracy, et cetera. And in that way, by the way, my book is also another book in that infamous genre of books trying to answer the question, why the West? Why has the West, why has European culture and then American culture been so successful and basically dictated the hegemonic culture of the world?Would you say has the West or did the West?What do you mean?Is this idea in decline? It's a separate question, obviously. It's not what the book is most fundamentally about, but I think people can't help but asking, where we're witnessing a world. First of all, you can't help but think, of course, slavery in America blossomed in a highly Christian environment. They were people of faith, and they absolutely believe that. You could look at Israel today. The people that say, go wipe out Huwara and go wipe out Gaza, are people who wear kippot and would I'll tell you, at least, I absolutely believe that all people are created in God's image. How can I not believe that? It says it in the Book of Genesis. So when you say there's no deterministic way, you're obviously right, because Christianity produce slavery and right wing Judaism is producing all sorts of horrible things. Let's go 30,000 feet above that, just before we come back to the argument of the book, is the West still going to be the West, or are we looking back at something that was and it's still close enough that we can describe it?Look, we're in a crisis. There's no doubt about it. We're in a crisis of the liberal order. I would say we're in the second crisis of the liberal order. The first one was 100 years ago with fascism and communism coming up. As explicit rivals of the liberal order, Mussolini and Lenin would say, liberalism is bourgeois nonsense, is egocentric, is a Christian, American, whatever idea, and we are against it. And we know what happened in the first crisis of the liberal order. Many, many Awful things. But liberalism prevailed. I think we're in the second crisis of the liberal order. I think the enemies of the liberal order right now are weaker than they were, are less coalesced, less sophisticated. They're less complex. We tend to forget how alluring and how complex were the ideologies of fascism and communism. These were serious frameworks of thought that people wrote books about, that people argued about.That attracted a lot of Jews, both in the United States and in Palestine and early Israel. And so today we don't have that. We have populism. We have, Identarian politics on the left. But we certainly are in a crisis. I'm not pessimistic. I'm optimistic about the liberal order.That was my basic point.I think the liberal order has withstood greater tests. And even the very fact that we live in a liberal order it's the conclusion of accumulated effort by so many activists and thinkers, most of them we have not even heard about. Many of them paid with their lives to forward what they thought was the dignity and autonomy and sacredness of each individual. And they succeeded against forces much greater than today, against a church that could burn you at a stake, against absolutist monarchy that could send you to the Bastille, et cetera. We did it once. I think we'll do it again. I think the West will remain essentially with this liberal character. Now, having said that, again, As you said, it's easy also to take from the Jewish tradition and from the Christian tradition, certainly from other traditions, other voices. We have other voices in our traditions. We have violent voices, we have racist voices, we have ethnocentric voices. We have all these. I think we can debate this. We can talk about this more, but I think the choice is ours. The choice in the end is ours. I choose to go with Chapter 1 in Genesis, the beginning of humanity, the beginning of personhood, which is that all people were created in the image of God.Okay, we'll come back and talk about the present time in a little bit because I want to ask you how a country that prides itself on its liberal ethos. Again, we just want to make sure that everybody understands liberal does not mean left wing. I think people get it. I just want to make it very, very clear. But I want to come back to that and talk about how a country that prides itself on having been founded very much in the liberal tradition. Even Ben Gurion, who violated it left and right and up and down, and day and night, believed in it very, very much. I want to talk about eventually how a country that was so deeply rooted in this liberal tradition has produced a religious edifice, which on one hand is deeply derivative of the book that you're talking about here, i.e. Genesis and the Tanakh and so forth, which takes this idea of everybody being created God's image seriously, and yet has produced, I think, a fundamentally illiberal way of life. If you had to ask yourself, tell yourself, a person who's coming from a yeshiva. You don't tell them which one. They're coming from five years learning in a yeshiva. Are they likely to be more likely to be leaning towards the ideas that are based in this book, which come from Genesis, or more likely to be ethnonationalists. It wouldn't be a bad bet to say that they're more likely to be ethnonationalists. I want to hear you think a little bit about with us later, because to me, this is what keeps me up at night, literally. How did this country produce that? But let's not get there yet. I want to talk about the book more, and I want you to explain more about the ideas that are in the book. So you take this idea that everybody's created in God's image as the central idea of the liberal West. You say that this idea basically produced the Western order as we know it.First, individualism, equality, I mean, liberty as personal autonomy. It's a specific interpretation of liberty. There are other ways to understand liberty. Meaning it even produces atheism and secularism at the end of the road. Because when you concentrate on the person, on the individual, and on individual autonomy, and when you locate great sources of sacredness and then also authority and also meaning within yourself. The image of God is within me. Maybe it's my reason, maybe it's my conscience, perhaps it's my soul. When you do that, the person learns to rely more and more on themselves and to treat themselves as indeed a source of authority, a source of meaning. That can take you to secularism because you say, I mean, why do I need the church to tell me how to interpret the Gospels? I can read and use my God-given reason or God-given conscience to interpret the gospel, the Holy scriptures, however I think. That's what Luther did.I may not need the Gospels. I may not need the Gospels at all.Then next step is, why do I need the Gospels at all? Why do I need Jesus? Why do I need Moses? I can be my own conduit to God, or what do I need God for? I can be my own God, my own person, my own authority.My own moral compass.Perhaps it's even in my human dignity to reject these fables and myths that I feel contaminate or dilute my reason or my dignity if I adopt them. I'm my own person. Then you get 20th century existentialism like Camus, who will say, Sisyphus is placed in front of a world that is an empty, barren, devoid of meaning, wasteland. But his dignity depends on him saying, yes, and I'm not going to fault. Yes, this is the truth. I'm not going to let myself be carried away with fantasies or fables that will comfort me, of course, but of course, will suppress my free thinking, will injure my dignity. But for me to remain my own man, a dignified human being, I have to reject all these as nonsense.So there is a way, tell me if I'm wrong, is there's a way, is there not, in which the liberal order undermines the liberal order in the following sense. The liberal order is derived from taking a biblical idea, as you show in your book, very, very seriously. We are all created in God's image. It's not a bumper sticker, and it's not an aphorism, and it's not something to sing about at a summer campfire, whatever. It's a serious fundamental philosophical idea. And you're saying that this idea that everybody is created in God's image, which then has implications for autonomy and individualism and for freedom and so forth, which is the basis of the liberal order. But then if I take this autonomy idea seriously, then I don't really need, at the end of the day, the church or the synagogue or the community or the Bible. And I can actually then come up with my own senses of whatever. One could argue, I guess, that the liberal order destroys the very sense of community that the liberal order needed in order to be created and to thrive. It has the seeds of its own burial buried inside it. Is that a fair assessment?I think that's true. I think the liberal order on its own will, at the end, self-destruct. I mean, it undercuts its own sense of community. As you said, it undercuts its own founding myth because at first you say, of course, all people are sacred because of the image of God, we must respect, et cetera. Rights discourse hinges on the image of God, as I show in the book. But then you cease to believe in God, and of course, you reject also the image of God because humanity is simply in a naturalistic, materialistic world. I would say yes, and I would say that it even comes further back than that from Christianity. Even Christianity, in a way, undercuts itself. Because the minute you place the crooks of religion inside the individual, with the individual and in the individual, you allow for this to progress or to develop into Lutheranism, Protestantism at first, then Unitarianism, Deism, and at last, Secularism. Because Luther would say, I don't need a Catholic church. I don't need the Pope. I don't I need the councils. I only need myself. I will translate the Bible from Latin to German so every layman can read and decide for themselves how they want to believe.Now, of course, Luther was a very religious person, very, very religious, indeed, extremely religious. But he opened the door, and this is a Christian door. This is an individualistic Christian door. Let's go back. It even begins with Paul. Paul says, You don't need the laws, you don't need the Torah, you don't need the ethnic specific group of the Jewish, the children of Israel. You are your own person. Of course, we have a church, we have a body of believers, but you are redeemed yourself by Christ if you believe. If you have some inner transformation, some inner metamorphosis. Paul uses the word metamorphosis twice in his letters. It's something that changes inside you. Then you're a free man. You're liberated and you're redeemed. Luther will take it one step further, you don't need the church. It's not only that you don't need the laws of the Torah, you don't need the authority of someone to interpret God's message. Then you'll get Unitarians who say, God gave us reason as the image of God, by the way, and taught us to think for ourselves. If we think for ourselves, we understand that the Trinity is actually a subversion of monotheism. What are we doing here? We don't need that. We're going to create the Unitarian Church which only believes in God. Jesus was a wise spiritual teacher. He's fantastic, but he's not the son of God. That's just right. It's not a person inside the Godhead. You got Deism. Please remember, perhaps our listeners don't know, Deism was the religious fashion of the late 18th century.It of the founders of the American Republic.Most of the people who are signed that the signatures are on the Declaration of Independence were deists. What do deists believe? There is a God. He is good. He wants us to be good. He gave us reason and the ability to think and make a choice between good and mad, so we will lead our lives in a moral way. That's it. Some of them also believe in an afterlife, some don't.Some of them had slaves, but okay.Of course, but that means also that through the image of God, which is reason, we now have rejected not only the Torah and its laws, not only the church and its authority, also Jesus, also Miracles, the virgin birth, the Trinity, of course, et cetera. We have remained with the bare minimum of rational, what they call natural religion. Natural because everybody can think and come to that conclusion. It's a universal natural religion. It's really just the minutest step from secularism. Because the next step will say, What do we need this God for also? If I use my reason, I also can come to the conclusion that there is no God. And we're atheists. So this streak of individualism that begins, it begins in the Bible, but then Paul takes it and carries it on. Then Luther accentuates it, and then 17, 18th century thought, even more underlines it, comes at the end or one of its venues, vectors, is at the end, secularism.Now, let me ask you a question. I don't think it's in the book, the book begs us to ask this question, right? So if you're going to argue that seeds of the erosion of the liberal order are in the very liberal order itself, which was created by this idea of everybody's been created, everybody has been created in God's image. And it leads us from, let's say, the church to Luther, to greater individualism to eventually, as you said, Unitarianism. And I was reminded as you were speaking, by the way, when my kids were living in Boston for a number of years, they went to this minyian called the Cambridge minyian, which met in the social hall of a Unitarian church. And so we had little grandchildren then. They were very little babies and whatever. My job, of course, was to hold the grandchildren and walk around the halls so my children could be in shul. I would look at the bulletin boards of this Unitarian Church. They had a soup kitchen, of course, because it was appropriate and everything. They had lots of different things on the bulletin boards, which by the end of the years, I knew these bulletin boards very, very well. I kept thinking to myself with a chuckle, there's actually nothing on this bulletin board that I can't subscribe to. As a Jew here, wearing a talit, wearing a kippa, holding a grandchild. There's literally nothing. Because as you said, even Jesus is put in terms of a great, wise teacher, whatever. Okay. Exactly. And then, of course, it takes us to deism and then eventually to secularism. Now, here's my question about to what extent are we witnessing what we're witnessing in the West? Let's take the worst examples of anti-free-thinking in the Western campuses, and the opposition to all sorts of things, including things that you and I care about very deeply and are living our lives for. To what extent is this radical anti-free-thinking movement on Western campuses, let's just say, like Columbia and Harvard, itself a result of the seeds of hyper-individualism that were planted in the liberal order itself? Did liberalism bring this on itself?Let me say, I'm a liberal. I'm for the liberal order. I know you are, you wrote a whole book called In God's Image.Yeah, and I'm a religious person, so I'm also for that. My book just shows some avenues and main avenues that idea took and developed through. But to answer your question, I think what we have in today's campuses is actually a reaction to that individualism because identitarian politics want to accentuate specific identities. People see themselves as part of groups, LGBTs or blacks or Jews or whatever. I think it's actually one of the reactions to the hyper individualistic scene that we have come to at the beginning of the 21st century, as is populism. Populism also will say, we are actually a group, and we don't want these elites or cosmopolitan or immigrants to dilute our group identity and our group. I think both are reactions to this. Again, if we go to the campuses, what they forget, what these people on the identitarian left forget is the basic principles of liberalism, of rights discourse, because if they silence people, they infringe on their right of speech. If they treat another person, let's say, an Israeli, as automatically liable for whatever their group does or their country does, again, it's not very liberal not to treat a person as an autonomous individual. I think there has been a crisis and a dilution of liberal principles there. But if I can, I also want to relate to comments that you interject here in place, which comments by the line of the founder of the US held slaves. And yes, these are all fantastic values, but we know that they are not realized, etc. What my book tries to answer, among other things, is why even would any person think that people, that all humans are equal to each other? Why would any person think that you must respect certain dimensions or depth within your other, within a person you don't know but have just met? You have to, by moral injunction, respect certain dimensions of that person rights. Why? I mean, the default position for humanity, I think, is to think we are the superior group. I am a superior person. The hierarchy starts with me on top. My group deserves everything. Your group deserves nothing. We can take whatever we want from you without thinking about it. That's the different position. Different position is people are violent, people are egocentric, etc. In order for people to even entertain the idea that actually all all humans are created equal, are fundamentally equal, it takes an enormous revolutionary idea and progressive development of a certain culture for that idea to take hold.Again, look at biblical times. If you compare biblical, Old Hebrew, ancient Hebrew society to other societies, the laws are different. Let's say laws concerning slavery. Did they abolish slavery? No. But did they legislate laws that were extremely progressive for that era concerning human beings that are enslaved? Yes. To stay on the topic of slavery, the first countries that abolished slavery were Christian countries. The first people talking for evolution were people who were driven by religious ideas like William Wilberforce, etc. Saying, No, people were created in the image of God. We actually cannot buy and sell the image of God. We actually cannot enslave human beings. Now, of course, there were at that same time Christians and even Jews, unfortunately, that says, No, the Bible actually legitimizes slavery, and it's okay. Yes, you've got those voices, but you've got, that's the default position, again, and you've got these voices saying, No, we actually need to abolish slavery because it's an affront to God-given image of God, et Et cetera. That's the special thing. That's the unique thing that this idea gives to society, in this case, Jewish, that Christian society, that makes it different. Indeed, the first time slavery, which was a universal social institution, the first time it gets abolished is in Europe.And so what you're saying is that although many people probably instinctively think of the Bible as a very traditional book, right? I mean, it's the bedrock of Western civilization, Judaism, Christianity, and so forth. It's actually a revolutionary book in its own way, right? I mean, it's a revolt against the world that had come before. I think you point that out in certain parts of the book, in the early parts of the book, if I'm correct. Of course. I'm doing it correctly, right? So just say something a little bit more about this, that there's something fundamentally revolutionary or rebellious in this idea that is in itself the bedrock of Western civilization.Of course, first of all, the Bible itself, things of itself as revolutionary, as standing opposed, right? Abraham, he's on the other side of everyone else. There's something else there. Of course, there's monotheism versus polytheism. There's a God you cannot see versus God's you, you can, et cetera. There's all sorts of revolutions there. Prophets are speaking up to King's, truth to power, et cetera. But this idea also, of course, is one of the things that the Bible uses to confront and to argue with the hegemonic cultures of the era, Babylonia, Assyria, Rome. Rome before Christianity would glorify heroes. Who were the heroes? They were brave in battle. They would cut their opponents heads off and arms off and whatnot. The torture was something that people lauded and enjoyed the Colosseum, et cetera. Here comes Christian tradition built on Jewish base and says, no, actually, the hero, the warrior, the killer is not the hero. The hero is the sufferer. The hero is someone who will be kind, who will be tolerant, who will be willing to endure pain for their own truth. This is the true hero, and this is the martyr. A new conception of what it is and of what it is to be a good human being, an upright person. And again, of course, a revolution in the way people thought. And that whole Roman Empire changes its character slowly but surely. Again, it turns into medieval Europe, turns into modern Europe, et cetera. By the way, you've got the rise and fall of the, sorry, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in which Gibbon actually says, this was the beginning of the decline of Rome, Christianity, because when they were pagan, they were brave and they were heroes and they sanctified the life and virility, et cetera. But when they turned into Christians, and this is also Nietzsche, they became weak and pathetic. But that change had come, and our modern world is built on those foundations.Look, that's the central idea of this book. And I think that at a time like this, when we're so concerned, no matter where we are in the political spectrum, no matter who we are religiously or not religiously, just as human beings, we're watching the West under great threat, of all different sorts, United States, in Israel, Europe, it doesn't make any difference. I think it's very, at least to me, very soothing to remind ourselves what the world that we love and care about is built out of. And I think that for many people, the intellectual challenge that you take, or the intellectual journey, I guess, is even better, that you take us on in this book is a really important reminder of what it was that is the bedrock of this world that we're so desperate to try to preserve and hold on to, even if we understand it's going to change, and even if we understand, as you put it, it's under a second major wave of threat, we have a deep-seated sense of what it is we're trying to preserve. I think your book helps us give much more meat and substance to an understanding of what it is that we're trying to preserve. What was the idea? Where did it come from? How did it manifest itself? And how did the West emerge out of that? I can't recommend it enough.Thank you.Now, I want to ask you something a little bit different, which is beyond the contours of the argument of the book itself, but I think is very much on the minds of people who listen to these exchanges, these interviews of leading Israeli intellectuals. I want to ask you something about religion, moderate religion, moderate religion and liberalism in Israel. You and I are, I don't know exactly what all your views on everything. It doesn't make any difference. We're pretty much cut from similar parts of the spectrum. We're cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways. We're both religious, we're both observant, we're both liberals. We care deeply about the religious traditions from which we come and the secular liberal order. We care about all of those things. And I think both of us are living in a period of tremendous sense of dislocation, perhaps disappointment, I would say even deep existential pain about the following. I want to ask, just to reflect on this. Now we'll switch the conversation a little bit to Israel, specifically.This is, in many ways, the first genuinely religious government that Israel has ever had. Menachem Begin sort of occasionally wear a kippah, but his government wasn't fundamentally a religious government. Of course. Bibi Netanyahu basically doesn't wear a kippa. He got a certain ceremonial moments, which is totally his right. I couldn't care less. But his government is fundamentally a religious government, and not only, by the way, because of the people who are in it, but because of the ethos of the discourse in this government. We don't have to go into all the ways that's playing out. But this is the first religious government that Israel has ever had, and it is, at the same time, one of the least liberal rights, observing freedom, actualizing governments that we've ever had. I'm leaving Palestinians, Gazans, et cetera, completely out of this picture for the moment. You're raising teenagers in this country now who you would like, I think, to grow up in a world in which the Jewishness of the state reflected the very best of the Western world that you want them to believe in. You want this to be a country which enables your kids who are now teenagers to grow up and to feel that there is a natural association and alliance between the very, very best of the Western liberal order and the very, very best of the Jewish traditional world.That's not what they're getting from their leaders. And my question to you is, can we turn this ship? Does Israel have the capacity to produce a religious enterprise which is fundamentally liberal at its core? Or is the Jewishness of this country always going to be in tension with the fundamental liberal ethos that you describe in God's image?Okay. The short answer is yes. At least I certainly hope so. One of the reasons I wrote this book was to tell my fellow Israelis, fellow Jewish Israelis, listen, what fundamentalists like Smotrich and Ben Gvir will tell you is something foreign, is something Christian, is something that infiltrates Judaism and we need to reject it is actually the very roots of your own tradition. This idea that people are equal, that they have rights. This is chapter one in Genesis. So don't reject it, adopt it, and build on it. So that's, first of all, what I was, among other things, trying to do. Just to say, there's no doubt we're in a tragedy now. I think Judaism in Israel right now is expressing its ugliest, most slowly, most despicable parts. Our tradition has, we said before, has these racist parts, has these ethnocentric parts. Netanyahu's government right now is not It's not only a religious government, it's a religious fundamentalist government. Look at his partners. His partners are not Hely Troper, Matan Kahana, or Micha Goodman, or us. Religious liberal. His partners are either fundamentalist religious Zionists, and not all religious Zionists, of course, are fundamentalists. These are Smotrich, Ben Gvir, or fundamentalist Haredis, with Litzmann and Golknopf and these people. These Haredi Both of these groups, as fundamentalists, see modernity as a threat, see the liberal order as a threat.Threat to what? What is the threat to them?It's a threat to their tradition and their identity. By the way, we said before, yes, liberalism, in a way, undercuts tradition, undercuts community. That's true. So they identify something true, but the remedy that they give to it is, of course, disastrous. Because they think for Haredi, if they close themselves up in closed communities and not expose their children to anything other than their own education, that will save their identity, that will save their tradition. Smotrich and Ben Gvir are even worse because they think we need to change the whole country, not our own community, but actually our own country in the image of our own fundamentalist ideas and reject liberalism, democracy, women's rights, feminism, gay rights, reject all those in order for us not only to keep our own tradition and communities authentic in their eyes, but actually to redeem the Jewish people and to create a Kingdom of priests and a Holy Nation. That's the problem with this government. You asked before, what happened to Judaism in Israel that produced these unfortunate avatars of Judaism. Look, the easy answer is orthodoxy. In Israel, we don't have reform, we don't have conservative Judaism, which are, of course, a lot more liberal, even in the United States. But that's an easy and actually wrong answer because we know there are liberal Orthodox people. Even in Israel, but you can The chief rabbi of Britain was Jonathan Zacks, who was not only a liberal, but a liberal thinker.We're having this conversation in South Jerusalem, and South Jerusalem is dotted with what we call liberal or even egalitarian Orthodox community. Exactly. It's possible.I'll just say it's not that. I think what happened here in Israel is the unification or the melding together of Orthodox Judaism and nationalism. What happened is that the state, as we know with Cookist theology, religious Zionist Coockist theology, became sacred for many religious Zionists. Now, again, you can have that view in mind.That's mostly a post-73 phenomenon.Exactly, right. It bases itself on the '67 miracle, quote, unquote.Like Gush Emunim.The settler movement, et cetera, sanctifying land, sanctifying sovereignty, sanctifying the very state. I think that was the beginning of mutation for orthodoxy in Israel that led it to this day. Because again, if you say '73, look before '73, you had religious Zionists, members of parliament and members of government like Yosef Burg, like Moshe Haim Shapira, which were to the left of the labor movement. They were humanists. They were Liberals. There were nothing like what we see today right now in government. So it's certainly possible, and I think most religious Zionists today have no problem with liberalism and democracy and want to live in a liberal and democratic state. We've got, at this time, out of an unfortunate, tragic political constellation in Netanyahu's own personal needs, we've got the worst coalition of religious fundamentalists, and indeed, zealots, that we have ever had.But here's the educational/political/philosophical question that I want you answer or try to answer. Can we create in this country a world in which the state is not worshiped but revered, in which still there's a generation of people when, God forbid, there's another October 7th, simply rush to tanks, go across the border, beg El Al to give them seats on planes so they can come back and come to war. I don't know that comes from a sanctification of the state, but it comes from a deep belief in the importance of the state. Can we create a world in which people care deeply, deeply, deeply about the state, but don't reduce Jewish religiosity to ethnonationalism? Can we create that? Because we don't really have the seeds of it now in any meaningful educational setting.Wait, wait. I think we can create it, and I think that's our challenge.Okay, and how do we do it?I mean, in Israel is poised at a unique position that actually caters to that and can lead to that. Israel, even today, has the best fertility rates in the West. I mean, one of the best in the world, certainly of first-world countries. Israel sees itself as a very tight-knit community, as a extended family. There's no lack of patriotism and solidarity, and and mutual trust, et cetera. As it is, Israel is such a society that is actually unique in the West in the amount of connection between individuals. What happens again at this time is that this was taken over by a government that I think represents a minority of Israelis. I think the majority has a good chance of doing exactly what you said, of creating a society that is both I mean, it's both very patriotic but also very liberal. As I said before, liberalism by itself is not enough. Yes, we need the nation as a story that binds us together. We need tradition, again, as a story that binds us together. We need communities. We need a lot of other sources of meaning and identity that complement the liberal order and allow us to express ourselves, to find meaning in our lives. Here in Israel, we have that. We have abundance of that. I do hope that when this government is out of office, we will start the Tikun, the process of repair.You believe that there are enough powerful educational and religious institutions, educational religious institutions, that can inculcate this idea of a liberal Jewish order, that there's enough religious leaders who care about this? You don't feel like you're a lone wolf crying out in the night?I mean, first of all, we're sitting in one of these educational places.We're sitting at Shalem CollegeBut your other question about religious figures, that's a problem. I think most rabbis today out of, I mean, Haredi rabbis care only about their own community, et cetera. But most religious Zion rabbis have attached themselves and invest our very much invested in the settlement project. I mean, the next argument we're going to have in the next government is the Palestinians and the Palestinian state. We've got another country recognizing the Palestinian state every day. That's going to be the argument, and they are heavily invested in the settlement project. It's going to be tough. But maybe this crisis will be a moment of rebirth. We know that there are countries and there are nations that use a crisis as a moment of rebirth and as a moment of return to their original and authentic DNA values. The US is, of course, a great example. The Civil War was a moment in which the US had to reckon with its promises of equality between all people, of rights, of liberty. It was an unbelievable trauma. It was the most lethal war in American history till today, including World War II. That's what we're talking about. But it gave the US a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln said. It made the US true to its inherent self, to its real self. I can only hope that Israel will also, out of this crisis, be born again true to its authentic self.And to remind ourselves what that authentic self is and the roots that that authentic self has in the Western tradition, there's an opportunity now to read a book by a religious Israeli committed to Western liberalism in God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea by Tomer Persico, Tomer Mazal Tov, on the appearance of the book.Thank you.Thank you again for taking the time to come in and have the conversation. Thank you for inviting me. I hope many of our listeners are edified by their encounter with the book, and I look forward to our next conversation and down the road to a conversation when we have an opportunity to describe how it was that Israel actually did turn the corner and come back to those very roots that you describe.I hope for that so much. Thank you.

You want to escape, even if only for a few hours. It’s been that kind of summer, and it’s likely to be that kind of year.

A break, even a short one, is so very tempting.

You know you shouldn’t try to escape—because the families of the hostages can’t. The parents of the soldiers in Gaza can’t. Where in this cosmos can they escape to where dread and desperation don’t shape every sleeping and waking moment?

You know that an hour and half drive away from Sultan’s Pool amphitheater, there’s a brutal war being waged. Soldiers are getting killed and grievously wounded. There’s a humanitarian disaster among Gazans—it doesn’t matter what definition you give it, you know that it’s there and you know that if your heart isn’t breaking, it should be.

There are hostages there, not starving, but being starved; day by day, to the point that even if they get out alive, what that might mean is not clear. But they won’t get out if the IDF gets too close, as we learned almost a year ago precisely when the six murdered hostages were found in a tunnel. And getting very close is precisely the plan of this new military campaign, which the IDF Chief of Staff opposes, as do many Israelis (according to some recent polls, 70% oppose the plan, though other polls put the number at closer to 40-50%).

So yes, you need a break. You want a break. And you feel like you shouldn’t take one.

But you do.

Shlomo Artzi, who is now 75 years old, is one of Israel’s most beloved and enduring singer-songwriters. He got his start in the late 1960s as a performer in the Israeli Navy’s entertainment troupe, but got his big breaks in the 1970s with albums like Shlomo Artzi (1971) and A Man Gets Lost (1971), and then again when he represented Israel in the 1975 Eurovision Song Contest.

Over the decades, Artzi has become a cultural institution in Israel, releasing more than 30 albums and selling over a million records—almost unfathomable in the relatively small Israeli market. When he was younger, he was known for marathon live performances that often lasted over three hours. He’s slowed down a bit—the concert we attended on Thursday night went for only about two hours, and the high notes aren’t what the high notes used to be, but it didn’t matter. Israelis—of all generations— love him, and because the mere name Shlomo Artzi evokes memories of a bygone Israel, he still sells out instantaneously.

So, we went. It was a lot of fun. Good for the soul.

And a reminder, all the same, that try though we might, there is really no escape.

There was, of course, the now de rigueur sign on the screens before the concert began.

Dear audience, If there is an air raid siren during the performance you are instructed to stay seated, to bend over as much as possible and to protect your head by putting your hands over your head for 10 minutes. It is important to stay in your place to avoid injury. Remember, the instructions of the Home Front Command save lives.

In other words, “Dear Audience, if there’s an air raid siren, there’s really nothing you can do. You can hope, you can pray, but when your number’s up, your number’s up.”

It wouldn’t take that much to get very cynical about the insanity in which we live. Except that when you look over one of the screens, and just atop it, you see the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, you’re reminded—we’ve been here a long time, and for most of that time, it hasn’t been easy to survive here.

Why did we really expect it was going to be different in our lifetimes? We did, of course. But why?

He was fun, the music was good, the crowd was very much into it. But what struck me as relevant to Israel from the Inside and the “peek” into Israel that we try to afford were those interspersed moments of the concert that were just uniquely Israeli, and in many ways, unique to this period.

Towards the bottom right of the shot below (I didn’t take a better one because I didn’t think about it much at the moment), you can see a few people standing and holding what looks like an Israeli flag. “Kinda sucks for the people right behind them,” I thought to myself a few times. It was clear that there was some writing on the flag, but I couldn’t make it out. They were holding it towards the stage—obviously towards the cameras, hoping that somehow whatever they were holding would make it onto the screen.

It did. What you see is the star in the middle of the flag, but then the head of someone in a helmet. And at the top, רס”ן דוד שקורי, הי”ד — Major David Shakuri, הי”ד. Holding the flag/sign are obviously his parents. A quick search turned up his tragic story.

I suspect that even the people sitting right behind them understood why the flag was held aloft for the entire concert.

There’s been quite a bit of coverage about Daniel Weiss, a musician who lost both of his parents on October 7th. His father, Shmulik Weiss, was murdered by Hamas terrorists during the attack on Kibbutz Be'eri, while his mother, Yehudit Weiss, was abducted to Gaza and later murdered.

When Artzi introduced Daniel Weiss and said that Daniel would sing the next song, a lot of people knew his name and clapped. When Artzi finished telling Weiss’ story, everyone applauded.

And then Weiss sang Artzi’s “Fields of Irises”:

The love song, sung by a young man who had lost so much, was hard enough. And then came the slide that needed no explanation:

The only sound in the amphitheater was Daniel Weiss. The thousands of other people were utterly silent.

At one point, Arzti sang Yare’ach, “Moon.” There’s that refrain which simply has to mean something very different than it did when Artzi wrote the song more than 30 years ago. Just look at the faces:

היתה תקופה כזו שהאושר בא בזעם, צחקנו מהכל, שרפנו את מה שבא ליד, לא נשאר לנו אלא לחבק את הצער, להגיד "אתמול היה טוב ויהיה גם מחר". אתמול היה טוב, אתמול היה טוב, אתמול היה טוב, ויהיה גם מחר. There was a time when happiness came in a rage, We laughed at everything, burned whatever came near, All we had to do was embrace the sorrow, To say "Yesterday was good and tomorrow will be too." Yesterday was good, yesterday was good, Yesterday was good, and tomorrow will be too.

Etmol haya tov — “Yesterday was good” Etmol haya tov — “Yesterday was good” Etmol haya tov, ve-yihyeh gam machar — “Yesterday was good, and tomorrow will be, too.”

At about 00:37, you can see Artzi, who has left the stage and walked into the crowd with his mic, motioning to someone. What happens next is most clearly seen on the left hand screen. Nothing more needs to be said.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

There was also Melekh Ha-Olam, “King of the World,” another Artzi classic. It opens with this verse:

שם בתוך מיטה, מול קיר ענק כחול, קר וזול, לפעמים אתה, נאנח בלי קול ובכל זאת, אמא שם שומרת גם כשאתה גדול מחליפה לך בגדים אומרת שאתה: מלך הגברים בשבילה אתה יכול להיות מה שבא לך לראש, למשל, מלך החיות או מלך ההרים, אם תטפס אי שם, קום תהיה כל מה שבא לך כי בשבילה אתה תמיד מלך העולם. Lying in bed, facing a huge blue wall, cold and cheap, sometimes you sigh silently and yet, Mom is there, watching over you even when you’re grown. She changes your clothes tells you that you are: king of men. For her, you can be anything that comes to mind, for example, king of the animals or king of the mountains, if you climb somewhere, get up, be anything you want, because to her you are always king of the world.

“Because to her you are always king of the world.”

And then the pictures below appeared on the screen. They needed no explanation:

Neither did the camera shot that appeared between those photos, as Arzti embraced the parents of the fallen soldier on the right:

And of course, the hostages.

The huge, agonizing, heart-slashing elephant in the room of every Israeli moment. Note how Artzi faces the photos, not the crowd.

At about 00:49, the photo was of Ilan Weiss, long known to have been killed, his body still held by Hamas.

As we saw his face on the screen Thursday night, who could possibly have imagined that we’d see Ilan Weiss’ face so soon again, this time not at the concert, but in the headlines the very next morning:

Eventually, of course, the concert had to end. Back to “real life.” Back to Shabbat, and then out of Shabbat. And then, Sunday morning’s headline:

the 900th soldier to fall in the war had just been killed. By friendly fire.

“Because to her, you’re the king of the world.”

The new offensive against Gaza City is slated to begin any day.

And one can only wonder:

Will it bring any hostages home?

Is it really going to bring Hamas to its knees after we’ve failed to do that for two years?

And how many more mothers are going to have to mourn their King of the World?

So will this deal (if it’s even real) be rejected? That’s the buzz on the radio at present. The families are increasingly desperate, as hostages are literally on the verge of death. The Forum is apparently calling for another “Stop Day” on Sunday, which will once again paralyze the country. That will please some, enrage others. Israel.

Several people associated with the Family Hostage Forum sent us the following link, which is quite old (December 2023) and asked people to post it again.

It’s beautiful, and it’s heartbreaking. Beautiful because of the music, and because we were so full of hope back then when it first came out. And heartbreaking because it’s hard to remember those days when we were so confident we were all doing all we could to get them home.

I don’t know if posting the video again was an official request of the Forum, or just a request of a few individuals who happened to reach out. But it really doesn’t matter.

So at their request, we share this video once again.

If there was ever a prayer we needed answered. ….

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Israel has more nonprofits per capita than any country in the world. That’s a reflection of the abundance of extraordinary people who live here, which, many of us deeply believe, makes this project called Israel “too good to fail.” Life here is not going to be easy for the foreseeable future, but that our deep reservoirs of dedication, bravery and raw human goodness will keep this place going, we have no doubt.

Very often, when I hear about a project that sounds worthy of being shared on Israel from the Inside, I reach out, chat with the people involved, and then we set up a time to record, often remotely. Every now and then, though, someone says to me, “It will really help if you come and see.” That’s what Rabbi Kalman Samuels said to me about Shalva, the institution he and his wife founded, and he was 100% correct.

Shalva is an extraordinary place, with a story well worth sharing. In today’s conversation, Rabbi Kalman Samuels tells the story of how and why he and his wife, Malki, created what is today an internationally recognized and admired Israeli nonprofit that supports and empowers individuals with disabilities and their families in Israel.

If today’s story leaves you wanting to know the story in even greater detail, Rabbi Samuels’ book, Dreams Never Dreamed (see below) is a compelling and moving read.

Kalman Samuels was born in 1951 in Vancouver, Canada. After a trip to Israel in 1970 he became enamored with Jewish culture and heritage and decided to make Aliyah. He studied in various Yeshivot and in 1977 he received his rabbinical ordination. In 1973 he married Malki, and in 1977, their second son, Yossi, at the time 11 months old, was injured by a faulty DPT vaccination and was rendered blind, deaf and acutely hyperactive.

After 7 years with no communication, Yossi's special education teacher achieved a breakthrough by relaying sign language into the palm of his hand, teaching Yossi his first word. Due to their challenges raising Yossi without adequate support, Malki and Kalman established an afternoon playgroup for children with disabilities. Over time, the program expanded to meet the needs of a broader spectrum of disabilities, from birth through adulthood. Today, Shalva offers a constellation of therapeutic interventions, family support, inclusive educational frameworks, social and recreational programs and vocational training to individuals with disabilities.

Dreams Never Dreamed on Amazon:

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

A number of years ago, I don't actually even remember exactly how I was in touch with Rabbi Kalman Samuels, who is the founder and the chief executive of an organization, institution that we're going to hear about today called Shalva. And he'll explain to us why it's called Shalva. And recently, I don't know exactly why, once again, his name crossed my screen, and I remembered him and his work. And I thought to myself, this is exactly what we need to talk about now. In this particular time in Israeli history, we are surrounded by tragedy. We're surrounded by sadness. We're surrounded by exhaustion. We're surrounded by great stories of heroism as well. But we are a people kind of exhausted at this moment. And the story of Shalva is the story, I think, of what happens when Israelis meet up with challenge and how they turn that challenge not only into opportunity for themselves in terms of dealing with the challenges that they're facing, but as a source of Hesed, a source of goodness and caring for the entire country and actually the world beyond. So I reached out to Rabbi Samuels, reintroduced myself. He reminded me that we had once been on the bema together at a shul on the Upper east side of New York, and to ask if I could take a look at the extraordinary institution that he and his wife have built, and then to have him tell us its story. And he could not have been more gracious.

And I'm delighted to be with Rabbi Samuels now. So, Rabbi Samuels, first of all, good to see you again. You're still in a tie. I'm at least in a sort of a T shirtish kind of a thing. So it was different, I'm sure, when we saw each other on the bima of an Orthodox shul on the Upper east side. We're going to get to Shalva in just a second. But I think the even more powerful and more compelling when people know a little bit more about your own background, where you're from, where you grew up, your road to perhaps what led you and your wife to want to make Aliyah. And then we can skip and talk about how did that turn into a decision that you needed an institution like Shalva.Thank you very much, Daniel. And I'm casual today. I'm without my jacket, just a suit and tie. So, yes, my name is Kalman Samuels, and my passport still has my maiden name, Carrie. And I grew up as Kerry Samuels in Vancouver, Canada, small Jewish community. And today I am religious. But in those days, apart from the Rabbi There was nobody religious in Vancouver.There was no Orthodox community in Vancouver at all.Minimal, totally minimal.It's different now, right?Oh, it's different. It's not huge, but it's much different. Yes. You know, Chabad came, others came, but I wasn't there then. And at the age of 18 when I went out of high school, I had a lot going for me. You know, I was a great athlete, if I may say it in those days. And I was a Canadian Little League all star catcher. I was a Walt Disney halfback and football, and I was a basketball scholarships to university. I'm five, nine now, but in those days I was six foot six. You know, you become religious and humble, it's just. Things happen. It's just tragedy. But I also had academic scholarships. And after one year of university philosophy and history, I was on my way to France to study and become a professor of Western civilization. And that was my stated goal. And my mother made a fatal mistake and asked me to visit Israel for two weeks en route to France. It's now been 55 years, and although I've been in France, I've never been there to study. So what happened to Israel in one year? So we're between the Six Day War and the 73 War.Three years.A period of euphoria in Israel.Absolutely, absolutely. And basically I was also a child of the 60s, you know, with everything, all the implications. And I like to talk to people, and I spoke to a lot of people in the two weeks I was here. I visited all the important places, slept on the beach in Eilat, was up in the kibbutz in the north. And somebody had the audacity to ask me, why are you going to France to study somebody else's civilization when you don't know your own? And I tried to tell him I went to Sunday school three times a week. And he began to ask me if I knew this or that. I had no idea what he was talking about. And he said, you didn't know the answer.You didn't understand the question.Have you ever studied Talmud? I said, what's that? Have you ever studied me? I said, what's that? He said, you need a yeshiva. I said, what's that? And these were the days before the Torahs and the, you know, those kinds of yeshivas. And it. We had to find a place how to study and where to study. So at first I went for six weeks just to figure it out. Then I say, you know, I'll go to the end of the Summer, I'll start studying in September. And then I told my dad, who was a successful lawyer, the dad I'm going to take a year off and figure this out. And he says, no, you're not. The Moonies have you and you're going to go study and you'll want to study Judaism, you'll study on the side. But I didn't. I took a year and I met a young man, 29 years old by the name of Rabbi Chaim Brovander, who had a new yeshiva called Hartman College. And I was one of his, the first year of students. And I found it exhilarating. And my father could live with it because it had a name, college. And after about a year of studying with English people, I decided that if I was in India, I wouldn't be hanging out with Americans. I'd go see an ashram. So I said, where am I going to find the Jewish ashram? So my grandparents were immigrants 120 years ago from Europe. And they spoke Yiddish. And I said, let me go find a Yiddish speaking yeshiva.Did you speak Yiddish?I didn't speak a word and the six words I knew were words I couldn't repeat. So I found the yeshiva in Bnei Brak called Chug Hatam Sofer.People should just understand. First of all, I meant to say before that, Rabbi Chaim Brovander, he's really one of the great Orthodox educators of our time. I mean he's built many, many things since you had the privilege of being with him. And just so you'll also understand a little bit background. Bnei Brak is one of the two or three main Haredi towns in Israel these days. So just to kind of give it a little bit of geographic context.Bottom line, I went into hardcore Hasidic yeshiva that spoke Yiddish. And I couldn't get enough from 4:30 in the morning till midnight. It just totally interested in my studies and I studied for many years. I met my wife Malki, we married, I took out a very serious ordination, smicha. And I thought that that would be my calling. And our second child, Yossi was 11 months old when Malki took him to a routine center where all babies get their vaccinations.He was born here in Israel.We were living in Israel. We never left at that time. We didn't leave rather. And so he had had several vaccinations and this one age of 11 months he came home and I came home from my studies at night. My wife was hysterical that he's not the same he's lethargic, his eyes are shimmering. Let's call the doctor. And I come from a family where all my uncles were doctors and I had a great intrinsic trust. I said, let's wait till the morning and see what happens in the morning. We called the pediatrician. He. It went from bad to worse. We wound up going to a neurologist. She took one look at the child and she said to us in horror, has this child recently had a DPT vaccine? And we had no idea what she was talking. We said, yes. That's when it started, Doctor. Anyway, she never spoke to us again in any way medically at that moment. She just sent us down the hall, what have you, and ultimately basically sent us away. We didn't know what was happening. My uncle was one of the senior doctors, head of orthopedics in Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn. He said, come out to New York. I'll put you in contact with some doctors who will talk to you. So we did, thinking we're going for three weeks. And the first neuro ophthalmologist we met did the same eye test as she sent us to. And he said something very different. He pushed away the little thing and he said to us, I'm very sorry to share this with you, but your son's optic nerve is atrophied. It's paled. He will never see again. So we got finality that he's blind. And then we got word somewhat later we decided to stay. He stayed, went to one of the best schools for the blind in the United States, called Lighthouse in midtown Manhattan.What years are we talking about?Now we're talking, Yossi was injured in 77, 79 beginning. We went out to New York, thinking for three weeks. We wound up staying for four and a half years. I went into the computer field, realized this is where I have to be for Yossi, if no one's talking to us in Israel at that time. And we stayed. And he turned out to be also deaf a year and a half later. So now we had a child who was blind, was deaf, hyperactive to the hilt. We also began having other children. And one day my wife had a visitor, an ultra, ultra Orthodox with all the trimmings from Jerusalem, who was a former teacher. And she was there for her personal reasons, for some wedding. But she took the time to come visit poor Malki. And she saw her and sight unseen. My son was in school. She said to her that, Malki, you must find a setting outside the home for this child because you will not be able to raise a family in this manner. And she had. You know, the fact was, it was very difficult. He was into everything. And my dear wife, who was half her age, looked at her and said, you know, Rabbi, you know how much I respect you, but you do understand that you have a problem. And she says, what's my problem? She says, you don't believe in God. Like, this is like telling Bill Gates you're broke. You know, what does she have? She says, what are you always preaching? That everything's from heaven and everything's for the good. But I see that's only until something becomes inconvenient, at which time we sweep it under the rug. And then you continue preaching, everything's from heaven and everything's for the good. I have news for you. My child is also from heaven, and it's also for the good. Do I understand it at this moment? No. But I will care for this child until the day I die at home. Okay, that was over. That night. Malky cried and said, God, I'm never taking Yossi out of the house, but if you ever decide to help my Yossi, I'm going to dedicate my life to helping other mothers with the issues they face with children with disabilities.

Fast forward. We're back in Israel. Yossi is now eight. He's in the deaf school and a deaf teacher, not long after we got back, put one palm on the table, and the other palm she spelled five symbols for Hebrew letters. Shin, vav, lamet, chet, nun, which spells the word table. And she did this for days on end. And he was like a little kid staring in space. No communication whatsoever. And he smiled from ear to ear. And she realized that he had just had the miraculous Helen Keller breakthrough to communication, where someone connects between the symbols in the hand and what he's touching. And she went ballistic. And we had no idea what she was so excited about. But she said, now she can teach him the other letters and she can teach him language. And she did, and he was gobbling it up. At first it was things can touch nouns, this, that, the other. And then it began to be even things that were abstract that he understood as well. After about a year of this, another speech therapist, also a young woman at the same school, said, now the school in the school for the deaf in JerusalemStill around?Yes. Oh, yeah, it's in. I forget the name of the neighborhood right now, but it's around. And she said, now I'm going to teach him how to speak Hebrew. And we said, mission Impossible. How do you penetrate blind and deaf? And she put her fingers into his mouth and he bit her initially. And she worked with him in miraculous ways. And after about a year of this, he spoke Hebrew synthetically. So now he spoke Hebrew. It was an amazing learning process.It's unbelievableBecause in Hebrew you have consonants and vowels. So if you have the first letter, Aleph, it's a sound. It can be A, E, or it can be anything, depending on the vowel. So so they put the letter was signed in his palm and the vowel was signed on his wrist below. So the word for mother is Ima. But the way he said it initially was, and that was after months, finally it became ima. And now we could speak to him very quickly spelling. It's amazing how fast and only 22 letters. And he was able to converse. So the president of Israel at that time, Chaim Herzog, may he rest in peace, the father of the current president, visited. Picture was in the paper. Ilana Dayan did a segment on him. Another famous.Ilana Dayan is one of Israel's really leading investigative journalists to this day. She runs a program called Uvda.So she did a nice segment on him as well. And he became known as the Helen Keller of Israel. But before that, immediately when we had this breakthrough, Malki sat me down. I came home from my work, I was working in the computer field here in Israel, and I came home and she sat me down and she said, I made a promise. God delivered. It's payback time and I need your help. I begged to get out of it. I said, like, what the heck do I know about these things? You know, I know I'm a little bit of computers, what have you, a rabbi, but what do I know about this? Anyway, it took years because we didn't have money. And one day I was in Vancouver and a dear friend of my father's, we spoke and he said, you know what? I want to see your wife get started. I'm going to give you 50,000 Canadian dollars. You go ahead, rent an apartment, hire a couple of staff and stick to your mission and be successful. So that was the beginning. I came home very happy. And we had to give this. I had no idea I even needed an organization. I just wanted to help people. But I learned liabilities and other things. So we had to have an organization. We thought of a name, and the name became Shalva, which was a name which is. It means peace of mind. The word is mentioned actually once in the entire biblical writings in Psalm 122, may there be peace in your walls. Shalva Serenity. And the reason for that is that people who have a child, as we do, when you're. It becomes known, whether it's at birth, whether it's a year, two years later, it's chaos. Life is just overwhelming. And what we've tried to do is not just give therapy for a child, but always to be focused on the family. So we started. It took quite some time. Took years. No, excuse me. After that money, it took a few months. And we lived in a neighborhood called Harnoff and we lived in a garden apartment. And lo, behold, the garden apartment next to us became available. Was rented. We rented it. And that's where we started with five children.And this is what year?The 19th of June 1990. It's now 35 years.35 years. Okay, let's just fast forward for a second just to give people a sense. Yes, because it's really an unbelievable. I mean I just finished a tour of the facility before you and I sat down. It's just literally. It's literally breathtaking. So we've come a long way. You have come a very long way from five kids in a garden apartment. This is a 11th floor building. Yes, 11th floor building. With how many people being cared for here?A thousand people walk through our doors every day. From mothers with babies after birth, preschools, after school program and a staff.How large?700.So there's a thousand people who are recipients of the multitude ofaround the clock services.Okay, we'll talk about that in one second. And hundreds of people who work here and probably giving that. This is Israel. I'm assuming a fairly large number of volunteers.Yes. No, no. The volunteers is what enables us to make it work.Do you have like Benot Sherut?We have 90 national service girls, which is a huge number in the field that we work with.They come for a year, for two?They can come for a year, they can come for two. But in general it's one year and you're out because you get burned out. It's just too much. So it's. But some do manage for two. And we have another 200 young Israelis volunteers. Israel is blessed with a desire. It's in their mother's milk. We want to volunteer, we want to help. And it's. People think I'm just caring for children and families with disabilities. We're raising a generation of young people whose values are being honed and trained. And the love they have for every human being is amazing. And these people are going to every walk of life, eventually at bringing those values with them.Well, that was one of the main reasons that I wanted to speak to you at this particular time in our people's history, because this is going to be a generation of rebuilding. I mean, we don't know exactly even when that generation of rebuilding is going to start, because we have started certain kinds of rebuilding, but we don't know when the war is going to end. We don't know if this is the last round of the war. The horror of the hostages is far from resolved. But we know that at some point, at some point this is going to get quiet and then this country is going to have to rebuild itself in virtually every way. The kibbutzim are going to have to be physically rebuilt and the people are going to have to have their lives reconstructed. The lack of trust between certain parts of this country and others, the Haredim and the non Haredim, about the draft issue and about many other issues, we're going to have to live together. So they may get drafted, they may not get drafted. I have my views, you probably have your views, but it doesn't make any difference at this moment.We're going to have to learn to live together. There are people here on the right and people here on the left and people who think that judicial reform did cause this and people who think that the judicial reform had nothing to do with this, and on and on and on. And we're going to be a people that maybe as long as you're around and I'm around, we're just going to be a people, you and I, our generation is going to sort of watch the rebuilding, but we're probably not going to live long enough to see the peak of the rebuilding because it's going to take a very long time. And that rebuilding is going to depend on this Israeli soul. And that was why it struck me that Shalva is such an important conversation and story for us. Now say something more about what this institution, which on a certain level, and I use the word just with, you know, air quotes, not just, but you know what I mean, it serves the people, the young, young children, the babies, and then a little bit older children and then young adults who I saw walking around and one of them was asking the person giving me the tour to come to Mincha in the afternoon. It was actually very sweet. And you see, I mean, you see, you see pools and you see basketball courts and you see incredible therapeutic centers. I mean, this is an unbelievable world class facility. But let's not Talk only about that there's a spirit here. What's the spirit? How do they. What are you communicating to them? In what ways do you think this is distinctly Israeli as opposed to human? And how do you see it kind of rippling out over the course of the next decades?So, first of all, we have to point out that the programs run around the clock. Programs have always been open to everybody. First come, first serve. We don't see ethnicity, we don't see anything.So you have religious and secular.Totally. Not only religion, secular. We have religious, secular, Jewish, non Jewish, Jewish, Arabs, Christians, Muslims. I mean, there's. Everybody is welcome here. And the thing about this place is that openness penetrates, in other words, all the divisions that we know in society around us. This is like a little oasis and a little haven where that does not exist. It not only doesn't exist, there's an incredible engine of unity and love and hope that penetrates. And it's not only because people have trouble, and therefore they're in trouble there together. This is just. We ask anybody about Shalva. What is one word you would talk about? Someone might say love, someone might say hope. But this is what unifies us. Shalva has gone from being a local place to municipal around Jerusalem. Then it went national. In recent years, we've gone totally global. We have 150,000 visitors a year from all over the world who come to see Shalva, to try and take pieces of what we do and use it in their countries. In the last six months, we've had, I believe, 42 ambassadors to Israel from countries around the world visiting with their staffs.Here, like official ambassadors.The ambassador of the government, China, India, Europe, Asia, South America, everywhere you can think of. And they all come, not knowing what they're coming to, but wanting to see it, and they all go away. Please help us. Please help us. Our way of dealing with people with disabilities in our country doesn't come to these standards. And we created what's called the Shalva Institute, which is designed with professionals, that we're here simply to share what we do with anyone who's interested. It turns out the interest is incredible. We've set up half a dozen centers around the world, not with my money, but with allowing and helping people from Siberia. A new one is opening up in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in September, and some of them larger. Oh, my gosh, I'm forgetting the name of the country next to South Africa. Very poor country with an M. Mozambique. Mozambique set up a center because one of their people had a Child had no help whatsoever. The way they cared for these issues, he told us, was that they conveniently walked along a train track and forgot the child. And this is the way some of these countries still operate.He, with our help, we trained him, he came, went back, started small, the government is now involved, and Mozambique is actually making real change, which will ultimately save lives. So Shalva is gone, I can't keep up with it. Yesterday I had two visits hosting people, entrepreneurs from South America, journalists from Africa, all over Africa. The Foreign Ministry brings these groups to Israel, and they have claimed and found that the most important place for them to bring them is to Shalva, because of all the wonderful things they see, this is where they get Israel. Yesterday I sat with a group from South America. And to your question, the fellow asked me at the end, he said to me, how do you explain that you're a newcomer to Israel and yet you have created something here that is really not your native language, etc. And I said, let me tell you something I found in Israel something that I don't find elsewhere, and that is the desire, the intense desire to young people to want to contribute to the greater good. And it takes many, many forms, but the problems that we deal with are universal. Yesterday a woman broke down, a woman from Chad or wherever it was, broke down and cried as we were talking. And she apologized and she said, I run this very significant person. She has a child that doesn't have these facilities, and she would love to have these facilities. So it's a common denominator that speaks like Fiddler on the Roof. It was attended by people from China because it was based on how do you transmit values to the next generation that everyone faces.There's not a civilization that doesn't face that.Similarly, here, no one is free of these issues. And we've come upon something where we do it in a way very different. So I've seen grown men walk in the front door and start to cry.I totally believe it.And when I said to a couple of friends of mine that had been here, I said, why are you crying? He says, come. And I'm overwhelmed. I was coming to a place for disabilities. And this is all by design. The joke of it all is that everything you see here was created and designed with experts. But by my wife, who has no background in architecture, no background in design, but there's nothing that moves or doesn't move here that she didn't design and create. And she was once asked by somebody, like, how do you have the. You know, that you did this when you know there's a lot of experts. She says, well, first of all, I worked with experts. I couldn't. My vision wasn't brought to. I couldn't bring my own vision, architectural plans, by herself or any other things. She knows she needs it. But she says, I. I do read my Bible sometimes, and I remember a story about Noah, and he built a ark and he saved the world. And sometime later, I think she was 1912, another group of experts got together and built a very big ship, and it didn't fare so well, the Titanic, she says, so, you know, there are. It doesn't always work one way or the other, with great respect to experts, but that is what's happening here. And it's an amazing thing. We were just named not only a center to give care, but to assess people's status. There's like three such centers, and we. As of next weekWhere are the other two?I don't even know who they are exactly, but they're centers that the Ministry of Social Welfare gives them the responsibility to assess a parent with a young child, as we did when we went to somebody to tell them to. Your child has these and these problems, we understand, and these are the rights and what they can get from the government and to facilitate all that. So people wait years to get that appointment. We have now opening. We're opening it in one week's time. And the lady who runs it all came to visit and see the new center, which we created space. And she was overwhelmed. She said, I can't believe it. I've never seen anything like this. Because whatever we do, it's not that we try. We just go a step further. And it's the beauty and the, It's by design giving people the respect and the honor they deserve. Because a mother gives birth to a child with a disability doesn't mean that she has something to be ashamed of or something she can't be proud of or something she can't have. Just the dignity. And this is what this is all about.There's a YouTube video. It's on your website, actually, also which I watched, of course, before coming. I watched the last few days. And it's a beautiful, very moving video in a lot of ways. But one thing in particular struck me is this young woman who has a young girl who's got down syndrome. And, you know, she talks about how any parent would talk. It's not exactly the best news in the world. And then she talks about after having been here with her child, as a very young baby, I mean, weeks or a few months, I don't remember that. She basically kind of met her kid again. She got a chance to reboot. And the young man who was taking me around before you and I sat down told me that he sees a lot of times that the mothers who come in here holding their down syndrome kids, they're holding them with their. They're holding the baby's back to their chest. In other words, the baby's facing away. And by the time they've been here for a short amount of time, the baby's been turned around and now the baby's face is touching the mother's face.And it's probably not a conscious thing, but it enables them to kind of reimagine. And as you're explaining all of this and how there's this desire to help here, I couldn't help but think, you know, we are being. Israel has never been more hated and maligned in the international community than it is now. It was bad in the seventies with the Arab oil embargo. It was bad when Africa turned its back on us after decades of pouring endless amounts of money into Africa to try to build relations. That was really Golda Meir's idea, which she got from Herzl's Altnoiland, believe it or not. And what we've done this, but I mean, we have had good years and bad years and better periods and it's never been as horrible as it is now. And it's actually kind of still getting worse. I mean, you open the paper and there's this new person that this country won't allow in, and Israeli tourists going to that country, another country won't be served. It's a disaster scene. And I think if you went to most Jews around the world, in all the great Jewish communities of the world, in Europe, in North America, South America, Australia, Canada, you name it.And you said to them, what's Israel export? They would say, basically, high tech. It might be military high tech, it might be medical high tech, but we're the startup nation and there's this sense and it's true and it's great. And it's the bedrock of our economy, or one of the bedrocks of our economy that we export tech and Shalva exports, but it's not tech. It's almost like the Jewish soul. It exports this notion that there's no soul that's not in some way saveable. There's no mother or father who in some way who been handed a load of burden and challenge. That they did not foresee when they decided to have a child. There's no family that can't be helped. And it just makes me think about Israeli export in a different kind of way. And you talk about somebody coming from Chad or different ambassadors, I don't think that's ever been more important than it is now. Because the world needs to see a part of Israel that's a very different thing. And I hope the people that are listening to this are hearing what you and your wife have accomplished along with. What did you say, 450 people who work here?700.700. Okay. Including the volunteers?No, not including.So there are 700 paid employees here?Yes. We have a $30 million budget. The government gives me 42%.And the rest you have to raise.We have a café and events and everything else, but we have to raise 10 million a year to stay afloat.Okay.I mean, I have white hairs for a reason.But again, I think that, you know, it makes me wish that the people who are listening to you will say to their friends and their non Jewish friends and the one who's saying, oh, Israel, my God, but they're doing in Gaza and I don't want to get into whatever is happening in Gaza. It's true. It's not true. It's exaggerated. It's not exaggerated. The truth of the matter is I haven't been there and you haven't been there and we actually don't even really know. But what we do know is this, that the love and the hesed and the caring that you just feel when you walk in the front door, even though I'm parked very illegally to have this conversation with you, as soon as you walk in the door, you just feel an overflowing abundance of love and care and devotion. We got to get that story out. I mean, I think this is a story not about you and your wife and your son. And this is not only a story about you and your wife and your son and the institution that you created. And it's not only a story about you and your wife and your son and all the volunteers and the people here who take this ethos and bring it around.It's the story of what the Jewish people supposed to be. And it's the story of what the Jewish state is supposed to be. Which is why I think this story is so fascinating and important not only for the cutting edge work that you're doing and bringing this kind of help to people all over the world. I want to ask you a question which we kind of skipped over, and I don't even know the answer to it. You mentioned your son, Yossi, and he was the impetus for this and, you know, the visit of the rabbi's wife in America and all that kind of stuff.So he must be, what, in his 40s turning 49. And I'm so glad you asked, because I would not want to leave the listeners with that. Okay. I do just want to pay, as in parentheses, the story I did write, finally, it's called Dreams Never Dreamed. And it's a very powerful book. And Malki has never read it. She never will, because. Because she's got no interest in being in the public forum. She was against it. She doesn't want to be anywhere. She just wants to do her thing. But the bottom line is, as someone once said, that you meet Malki front and on this powerful woman who made a lot of decisions.And the book is available widely, right?It's on Amazon.Yeah. So we'll link to that and people who want to read the full story can get the book and learn about it that way.But anyway, Yossi, which is most important, Yossi's turning 49. Yossi is the most powerful person I know. He is blind, deaf. At the age of 22, we made him an operation to try and help his hearing called a cochlear implant. And it didn't help the hearing much, but what it did do, freakishly, is it's something that the wires go into the middle ear, and it impacted his balance. And for six months, we suddenly saw a child for the first time. He always walked. A bit difficult, but he walked. And now he had a hard time sort of having the confidence to take a step. And of course, he wound up in a wheelchair. That was, for him, a devastating thing. Yossi. He has thousands of friends. Yossi communicates with them all. He's got his own iPhone. Always a new iPhone. We have a friend of ours that always gives it to him. And he can't send messages on the iPhone, but people are forever sending him whatsapps, emails, phone calls.How does a person who can't see use an iPhone?I really actually, no, I say he needs help using the iPhone. He needs help, but Yoshi has help around the clock because he can't see where he's going and he can't walk. And what does he do during the day?He gets up in the morning, has a cup of coffee, puts on film, says a prayer from whatever. He prays for other people and he goes to work. He works at Route 6 headquarters. He puts it together, easy passes, which are three piece mechanical passes you put on your visor. And he has three boxes and he takes one piece here, one piece here, one piece there.Can you get me the plastic part that holds it onto the windshield? I swear I told him five times and asked for a new one.I promise you, Yossi will get it for you. He's got pull. So bottom line is that he puts together like 400, 450, 500 a day, and a regular Joe puts together 750. And I asked the advisor there, I said, like, I don't get it. How is it that he puts so many. He says, Kalman, you don't understand. Yossi doesn't talk on his phone. Yossi doesn't text when he's working, when he goes to the bathroom, he checks out. When he comes back, he checks in and he actually works. Other people are doing a lot of other things while they're working. And that for him is, if you ever ask him what he does, the first thing he'll say is, I work that we recognize that inclusion doesn't stop by the word inclusion. Until you've not enabled an individual to be able to contribute to society in some way at his level, you haven't fulfilled your inclusion. When we saw Yossi, we as parents didn't even understand the power till we realized, my God, this is what's important to him. Yossi has a sense of smell like a bloodhound. And we thought about perfumes and someone suggested wines. And many years ago, Israel's champion wine taster, Jesse Bodak 2007 trained him for a year and a half with wines, and he became a toyem yain, a sommelier. He created two of his own wines. He's creating new wines now, and that makes him proud as well. It was sold in duty free.And no greater Jewish accomplishment than to be sold in duty free.Totally, totally, totally, totally. But Yossi also travels the world. He, as a child learned to identify cars by their door handles. And Volvo was his favorite. And Volvo invited him out to Sweden, to Sweden. And I went with him, of course, and he had the most amazing royal tour of Volvo. And he's also a political animal. He knows politics better than you. And I may not better than you, certainly better than I. But he's, he's like up to date. And he, he'll tell you, he watched the news. He, someone's watching the news and telling him somebody's reading, that used to be the paper, now it's online. And he's has a large amount of political input. He has his political people that he loves. One of them was George Bush. And he met him at the White House in 2007, and it was the funniest meeting of all. He walked in and he said to George Bush, And I translated, Mr. President, I have great respect for your father, but I respect you more because of your war on terror. And George Bush was in awe. Laura was there as well. And before Yossi left, he said to him, he first of all told him, he named eight soldiers who were in captivity. Those were the days, eight soldiers in captivity. And he asked him to please help to get them out. And then he said, Mr. President, before you leave this White House, it was towards the elections. It is your responsibility to take care of Iran. And the president gave Yossi a little knock on the shoulder. He says, Laura, this young man knows what he's talking about. And there is what to talk about. The next day, the first sanctions in the UN went into place, and people were writing, newspaper people from Israel. Wow. Yossi did it. I said, what do you think? He went in for a photo op. So, yes, he said, very active, very involved, very social. And people who meet him claim their lives are changed. It's like just meeting somebody that you cannot imagine where his questions will go. And you look at him and you can't imagine what he could possibly know.And apropos the centrality and the importance of employment to these people's lives, it's my understanding that many of the people who have been through many of the programs here at Shalva actually now work here.We have over 120 people working here, producing their products are sold in our store. Whoever we are able to get out of here and get into, let's say, we've had courses in training to be not chefs, but cooks. And those who are capable get jobs in restaurants, cafes. But it's a huge element. And we also have 25 apartments for adults, meaning six young women in one, six young men in another. Magnificent apartments. And they're here, all in the greater Jerusalem area. And the beauty of it is, is that they're part of our family here, where they come to swim, they come to play ball. They're not in their apartment watching tv.So Shalva is still their home, even though they're sleeping in other places.So we're from, it's literally cradle to grave. And it is, you know, a mother comes in here, she knows that she may come in with a problem if she chooses, she has a solution here for the rest of her life.Well, that's exactly what a Jewish society should be about. And it's the part that makes us, I think, unbelievably proud to be Jews. And it's the part that makes us unbelievably proud to be Israelis. Which is why, as I said to you at the outset, this is always an important story. And 10 years ago it was an important story, and 10 years from now, it'll be an important story. But I think at this nadir of our sense of self and at this nadir of our pride in what we've built here, even though what we've built here is extraordinary, it's going through a very hard time, this story about that angle of what Israeli society is all about. As it seems to me, it's oxygen for people under the water who are struggling to get to the surface, who need to breathe deeply. And for what you and Malki have done in general for Israeli young people and Israeli families, what you're doing for the reputation of the Jewish people around the world, obviously there's not enough words to thank you for who you are and what you've done, but to thank you for doing it at this particular time, I think I can say on behalf of everybody who's going to listen to us, you've given us hope and reason to remember that this country is not about what's in the newspapers right now. This country is about something much deeper, much better, and much more everlasting.I see it day by day and with everything I see. And no one is blind to what's going on and the challenges in our society, there is great hope. I see these young people and I see that it doesn't make a difference if they're going into medicine, they're going to be a housewife. Doesn't make a difference. They are great people who all they want to do is make a difference in other people's lives. And they will make it, and Israel will thrive.Amen to that. No better way to conclude our conversation. Rabbi Kalman Samuels, thank you so very much for your time.Thank you and God bless.

Reasonable minds can fairly disagree about a lot of things here. And they do.

But no, reasonable minds cannot disagree about what is the right thing to do — actually, not the “right” thing, but the most basic, human thing to do — when six hostages who are citizens of the country of which you are the government are found murdered in cold blood in a Hamas tunnel.

Perhaps the deepest tragedy of the ethos that this government has spread over Israel is pointed out by one of Israel’s most eloquent voices — Rachel Goldberg-Polin.

Today, as the first yahrzeit of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, z’l, is just hours away, hearing Rachel’s voice feels like the most appropriate way of marking this terribly somber moment.

The video above (the full version appears below) appeared on the Facebook page of a group known as Democracy Now.

Below is the video in full.

On this horrible one year anniversary, there’s really nothing else to say.

Except יהי זכרו ברוך, may Hersh z”l’s memory, along with the memory of all six of the beautiful souls who were found murdered in cold blood in that Hamas tunnel, be an everlasting blessing.

And … may we as a society learn to be much, much better.

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But we overlook it—or chuckle at it—at our own peril. Keep your ear to the ground around here for even a little bit, and there are signs everywhere that the rule of law in this country is on much thinner ice than we might imagine.

For complicated reasons (and no, it’s not as cut and dry as either side claims), PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Justice Minister Yariv Levin—cheered from the sidelines by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir among others—have been trying to get Israel’s Attorney General Gali Barahav-Miara fired for a very long time. The government finally did vote to fire her on August 4, but the Supreme Court issued a stay—meaning that for now, she’s the Attorney General.

But Levin, the Justice Minister ostensibly responsible for rule of law in this country, has run out of patience as he’s wanted her gone even since Judicial Reform Days, so he had the locks on her office changed.

When the High Court expressed displeasure, he responded that her office belongs to him.

The United States has a minimum age for serving as President: 35 (Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 on the Constitution). In Israel, where there is no Constitution, adolescents can apparently occupy the highest positions in the land. (That’s not to take a side on the AG’s being fired—it’s actually more complex than many wish to admit. But it IS to say that changing locks when one objects to the Court’s stay is outrageous.)

Benny Gantz thought that “adolescent” was too kind. After the lock-changing stunt, he asked, “Who said that kindergartens aren’t open in August?”

Of course, even as things get ominous on the rule of law front, the government’s opponents never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as Abba Eban famously said of the Arabs after the Geneva Peace Conference in December 1973. When protests about the war eventually subside and judicial reform / rule of law return to the spotlight, this week’s “end the war and bring back the hostages strike” protesters will likely regret scenes like this:

If you’re a pregnant woman in labor on that highway on the way to the hospital, you might feel a bit dubious about the protesters’ devotion to civil rights.

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Which brings us to the video above, the mainstay of today’s post. The clip has gotten a lot of play and has made its way around Israeli social media—we just added the subtitles for our readers.

If you watch the video carefully, you can see why it’s gone viral in some sectors of Israeli social media. Note:

* Israel’s a democracy, but Netanyahu doesn’t actually say anything positive about being a democracy. What he does praise is the UAE’s lack of bureaucracy.

* Note the seemingly parenthetical comment about needing to “restore” the balance between the branches of government. There is a good deal of truth to that, of course, but the critical question is how. That was the essence of the judicial reform debate-which-became-a-crisis. Is he laying the groundwork (i.e., raking the infield) for something?

* Change is afoot in the Middle East, he says, and Israel is no longer at the cutting edge. We simply need to become more like the UAE, he intimates. In what ways?

* Is the comment about ending hyper-legalization his answer to how we stay ahead of the curve? What if democracy invariably means bureaucracy? Bibi has for sure read Max Weber. Probably even Woodrow Wilson, who advocated for governmental bureaucracy. His thoughts on them?

* Would Levin say that the Supreme Court’s stay was simply bureaucracy, so he could change the AG’s locks? Is ignoring the court what Bibi means by realigning the powers of the three branches? Some Israelis are worried, some look forward to those changes.

Bibi’s comments to i24 could, of course, be just a “clip.” But Netanyahu rarely speaks to the Israeli press, so when he does, he chooses his words wisely.

There’s a famous discussion in the Talmud (B.T. Tamid 32a) of what makes a person wise.

the Gemara relates that Alexander of Macedon [DG - Alexander the Great] asked the Elders of the Negev about ten matters. … Alexander said to the Elders: Who is truly worthy of being called wise? They said to him, Who is the wise person? The one who sees and anticipates the consequences of his behavior.

Benjamin Netanyahu calibrates what he says to the Israeli public very carefully. It might just be, therefore, that as we recall the Elders’ answer to Alexander the Great we would do well to add:

Who is wise? The one who hears and anticipates the possible consequences of what those around them are saying.

I hadn’t thought of Lichenstein in a long time, until United Torah Party chairman Yitzhak Goldknopf said a few weeks ago that if Israel insisted on moving ahead with drafting the ultra-Orthodox, the Haredim would just leave. His stern warning: “Israel will be left without Haredim.”

It’s impossible to describe the fear that rippled through Israeli society—because there was none.

For the moment, at least, the Haredi issue is not much in the top headlines. For now, Israel is focused on the issue of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel’s military plans in Gaza (or lack thereof, if one believes Bezalel Smotrich, who may well be right about Bibi’s plans this time) and Israel’s increasing international isolation.

With the cabinet having approved plans to take over Gaza and to invade Gaza City (which many are warning could well lead to the deaths of some hostages, while others respond that it’s not as if not entering Gaza City is getting the hostages out), people are focused on how many soldiers will be called up (apparently some 250,000 once the operation reaches its peak) and whether the mere threat of invadingGaza City might just tip the scales and get Hamas to negotiate.

Another reason that the Haredi issue is not in the headlines is the simple fact that the Knesset is on summer break, so there’s no legislation being passed anyway.

But there is no doubt — the issue will be back, and in tomorrow’s podcast, we will hear from an Israeli American-born Haredi rabbi, Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, who has views that may strike some of our listeners as very surprising.

Before posting that interview tomorrow, though, it felt important—especially as the issue is now fairly far removed from the headlines—to remind us all how explosive the issue has become, especially among the national-religious crowd (but not only, of course), who are carrying more than their share of the burden of this war.

If staying in power is Netanyahu’s chief concern (and I don’t know anyone who does not think that it is), then — just as is the case with Gaza — he has no good options. Exempting the Haredim from the draft would unleash a firestorm in Israel, one that even Bibi might not be able to weather and that army might be able to withstand. So, too, though, is not exempting the Haredim from IDF service almost certain to unleash a tsunami—from the Haredim.

The Haredim have already essentially declared war on the idea that they should do their share in defending the country:

Those sorts of headlines do make non-Hebrew press, but what is much less accessible outside Israel is the social media firestorm now being unleashed by those who have simply had it with the government’s caving in to the Haredim, as their own husbands have been called up again, sometimes for their fifth tour of duty in this war.

As we hear from the enraged, cynical speaker at the Knesset meeting in the video at the top, these soldiers’ businesses are collapsing, their marriages are hurting (and in some cases, crumbling) and —though she does not mention this — PTSD cases and domestic violence have both dramatically increased. In her instance, the issue at hand was the financial support for the Haredim and not for the tends of thousands of reservist families who desperately need it.

There are dozens, probably hundreds, of such videos on Facebook, Instagram and throughout Israeli social media.

For some people, though, it’s not the issue of funding (as it is in the video at the top of this post) as much as the government’s refusal (for decades now) to finally get the Haredim to serve. And like Goldnopf (who threatened that the Haredim would leave Israel), the speaker below also makes a threat. Here is a religious woman speaking to Israel’s first religious coalition, saying, “We’re going to get rid of you.”

Unlike Goldknopf, she’s serious. And unlike Goldknopf, she and her community can actually do it if is opposition voters join together—and more on that in a moment.

And when we get to a seasoned speaker like MK Gilad Kariv (Democrats Party), the rhetoric is even more heated (and eloquent):

It doesn’t come through in the papers, but the rage is real, and it’s wall to wall. It’s muted now, perhaps, because until the Knesset returns from recess, there is no legislation to pass anyway. But when the MK’s do return to work, this issue is going to be THE issue in Israel — and almost no matter what happens, it could well explode.

Which brings us back to Goldknopf’s threat that the Haredim will leave Israel. They, of course, will not leave, for they will suddenly discover that other countries require people to work in order to get a salary. They will discover, in other words, that “job” is not just the name of a book in the Bible.

They’re not going anywhere, and they know it. Everyone does.

So why might the threat of greater Haredi resistance actually be good news?

Because for once and for all, it might just give non-Haredi Israelis a cause around which to unite. For things to change, what has to happen is clear: Israelis of all walks of life, religious and secular, right wing and left leaning, in favor of annexing Gaza and against, those who believe that Israel is in some ways responsible for the humanitarian situation in Gaza and those who do not — will all have to decide that THE issue around which they will coalesce as voters in the next election is not left/right or any of the other divides, but served/didn’t serve. If those who served, and want everyone to serve, can unite, the days of the Haredi stranglehold might be over.

Can Israeli voters do that?

That is very far from certain. Above all else, it would take a charismatic candidate who can give a wide swathe of Israelis the confidence that s/he gets them, cares about their worldview and wants to help shape a Jewish state in which they all feel they have a stake and a future.

Is such a person out there? Israel’s future might well depend on the answer to that critical question.

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Tomorrow, as noted above, we explore the issue of Haredim serving in the army in a podcast conversation with Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, who holds views that many may well find surprising — and refreshing.

And still, as sobering as all the above is, the daily news is also filled with reminders of the indomitable spirit that still pervades this country.

The above photograph, of a rabbi performing a wedding ceremony, appears entirely ordinary. But there was nothing ordinary about the wedding, about which YNet reported.

The rabbi performing the ceremony is Rabbi Tamir Granot, head of Yeshivat Orot. The bride, Roni, had been engaged to Rabbi Granot’s son, Captain Amitay Granot, who was killed by a missile fired by Hezbollah.

According to the YNet article, Roni and Amitay got engaged during Sukkot, a few days before the October 7th attacks. Shortly thereafter the war began, they spoke on the phone and agreed to get married as soon as Amitay got a few days off from the army.

He was killed that very same day.

At his sons’s funeral, Rabbi Granot spoke to the woman who was to have become his daughter-in-law, and told her it would be hard, and it would take time, but “choose life, choose life, choose life.”

She did. And earlier this week, he performed her wedding.

As for why the photo in the story is of the rabbi and not the couple, the last sentence of the article makes it all clear. Her new husband “A”, is an officer in “an elite unit.”

After all she’s been through, she’s married a soldier whose position is too dangerous to even mention.

It is people like her who are the reason that so many of us — despite the heartbreak of this present era and the even more difficult times that likely lie ahead — are so confident of the future of this place we call home.

This doctor said to me that though he spends all his days working with people who are terribly broken, some of whom will get better and some of whom may not, this young, wounded generation of Israelis fills him with profound hope, not anguish. “How?”, I wanted to know. Because, he said, he gets to see daily the deep goodness and caring that virtually ooze from many corners of this society. There are days when that goodness actually overwhelms him.

When I first learned about the work the Ilana Saks does, and the village called Geva’ot, which was founded with the express purpose of fully integrating people with special needs with the neurotypical people who make up the rest of the community, I knew that I wanted to learn more. And I’m grateful that Ilana was willing to share her story. When a skilled and widely admired teacher of Bible decides to pivot and to make this work the center of her professional life, something very Israeli happens, and as we hear today, Ilana is hardly alone.

Her commitments and her work, especially in these challenging and painful times, are a balm for the soul, a reminder of the unique pools of devotion and acceptance that, when it is at its best, are what Israeli society can be about.

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For more information about Geva’ot and Sadnat Shiluv, see here.

A brief video, with Hebrew and English subtitles, can be found if you scroll down the page.

Ilana Goldstein Saks is the coordinator of the bakery at Sadnat Shiluv, a special needs community in Gva’ot. She has an MA in Bible from Bar-Ilan University, has taught in a number of midrashot and schools in Israel, and has also baked and taught workshops on bread and Jewish sources at an artisanal bakery. She lives with her family in Efrat.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

These are times in Israel when I think it's super important to try to keep our eye on two different balls. One is what's happening in the country in terms of the war, and obviously, most critically, the hostages, and politics, and all the stuff that keeps the newspapers busy on a day to day basis. But there's also a soul to this country, and it's the soul of this country that is what makes many of us fall in love with it and leaves many of us, even though things are not necessarily easy here at this point, wanting to who continue to live here and hoping that our children and grandchildren will live here and wanting to see this through till the better days that I firmly believe are ahead make themselves manifest. And in order to do that, I think it's really important, and we do it periodically on Israel from the inside. Is introduce people and projects that just somehow represent the absolute utter goodness of Israeli society. And we're going to do that today with Ilana Sacks. Ilana and I mostly know each other through her husband, who is a colleague of mine, but She works in a very interesting place in Gush Etzion , which is the, I guess you call it Bedroom Community of Jerusalem, just south of Jerusalem, where is Eleazar and Efrat, Neve Daniel. We'll put a little map just so people can see where it is. Elana works at a place called Sadnat Shiluv, which we're going to learn more about in a couple of minutes. So first of all, thanks Ilana for taking the time. You made Aliyah, so let's just start at the very beginning, where you grew up, where you went to school, when you came on Aliyah, what you thought you were going to do, and what you are doing. Let's start with that.Okay, so I'm very happy to be here. So I grew up in Riverdale in New York. I went to SAR, then Ramaz, and to Barnard College, with a year of Israel somewhere in between. And I I met Aliyah right after I graduated Barnard in 1992 and moved to Jerusalem.Okay. And what were your plans professionally when you came? Because I think you're doing something now that's not what you expected to be doing, right?Correct. When I first came to Israel, I was teaching TanakhWere you married yet at that point?Not yet. I made Aliyah single. I was teaching Tanakh and also studying Tanakh at Bar Ilan University, where I did my master's degree in Tanakh. And I taught Tanakh for many years in various shapes and forms. And then a few years ago, I would say it's now probably around close to 10 years ago, I made a slight change. I continued teaching, but I also started working in a bakery where I worked for about three and a half years.What in the bakery? Like a baker-baker?I was a baker-baker. Mixing the flour, a lot of bread, a lot of rolls, baguettes, and a lot of muffins. So that was one of the main things I did. And then Corona came, and I suddenly lost my job at the bakery, and I was trying to figure out what next. And then somebody sent me a WhatsApp with a wanted, not a wanted, how do you say that?A job opportunity.Job opportunity to be the, the coordinator of the bakery in a place called Sadnat Shiluv, which I only knew a little bit about, although it was right down the road from me. And The person wrote, This looks like it might be good for you.And is this still during COVID or after COVID?This was mid-COVID, I would say.So they were hiring people in person or it was a remote job?It took a little while until I actually got there for an interview, but by the time I was there, it was easing up. Still mess a lot of the time, but not all the time. It wasn't at the height, but let's put it that way. And to make long story short, so I started working at Sadnat Shiluv.Coordinating the bakery.Coordinating the bakery.Let's start in and then zoom out. Tell us what this bakery is, and then we'll go out from there to what Sadnat Shiluv is in its whole story and why it's called Sadnat Shiluv. You can explain what a Sadnat is and what Shiluv is, and then we'll put the two together.I'll start with my bakery. The bakery is a small part of Sadnat Shiluv. I work with adults with special needs. The youngest of the people in the bakery who I work with is 23, I believe, and the oldest is 40. So there's an age range. And basically, we are a bakery, a real bakery. We pride ourselves that it's real work. We actually have deadlines, and we have to get stuff done on a daily basis. We provide, for the most part, we bake for two different things. There's the apartments, which I'll explain in a moment, where the people live. And there's a Beit Kafe [café] in Gva'ot, where Sadnat Shiluv is. And so some of the stuff we bake for the apartment, and some of the stuff we bake for the Beit Kafe.Beit Kafe means café. And how many people live in Gva'ot?Okay, so now I guess I should explain a little bit about Gva'ot. Gva'ot is a small Yeshuv, a settlement in Gush Etzion. From its founding was an integrated Yeshuv, meaning integrated with people with special needs. At the heart of Gva'ot is the program where I work, Sadnat Shiluv.When was it founded?So it was founded approximately 13 years ago.2010-ish.Right. But Sadnat Shiluv was around before that. When Gva'ot was started, it then moved to Gva'ot with the founding of the issue.What's the profile of the people who founded Gva'ot? Israelis, Olim, religious, secular? What's their story?It's religious, although I would say it's religious of a very interesting, out-of-the-box range. It's some people who look like your typical dati leumi, and some people less so. But the atmosphere of the Yeshuv is a religious Yeshuv.Who founded it? What was their profile?I would say it's mostly born and bred Israeli. So there are some people there who are Olim. In other words, because it was founded as an integrated Yeshuv, so I don't know the names of every single person who was involved with founding of the yeshuv. But two main names, certainly on the Sadnat Shiluv end of things, are Noa Mandelbaum, who is, I call her the prophetess, but she's the main founder of Sadnat Shiluv, and Tamar Heksher, both of whom live in Gva'ot and are the people basically who run Sadnat Shiluv.Have they been doing this work before they founded Gva'ot?So the story of the backstory, the legend of how Sadnat Shiluv began is actually, I think it's a very sweet story. It starts with Noa Mandelbaum, who was a ganenet in a nearby yeshuv.Like a nursery school teacher.And there was a boy, Hanan, who at the time was actually nine. He was bigger, older than most kids who are in gan in kindergarten. And he has down syndrome, but he was in the gan. And he, let's say, wasn't doing terribly well in fitting in, which is how he got into the gan in the first place, because every other place they tried to have him go was not working out so well. But she worked with him, and he went from being a very disruptive, somewhat violent, maybe not an extreme, but to some degree, violent, the way that little kids can sometimes be, and not very verbal. And by the time the year was done, she had managed to get him to function very well. His verbal capabilities were much better and his functioning level was much better. But you can't keep a nine-year-old in gan forever. So she basically decided that she wanted to figure out something new, that clearly the educational system, the way that it exists, doesn't always have a place for everybody. The way she tells the story is she looks at him and says, Okay, Hanan, let's go find a place that will take both of us. And she basically was trying to find some place where she could create some program for people like Hanan, and that would work for them. It was for a short while in Bat Ayin, which is also in Gush Etzion.Which is also a different It was just a free spirit place.Exactly. Not a very out of the box place. Then for a while after that, it was in Rosh Tzurim, which is a kibbutz nearby. But in the very beginning, it was this one boy, Hanan, and a couple of others who joined him. And Sadnat Shiluv grew from there, meaning when they were these little kids, so they had classes for the appropriate age. And then when they needed a high school, so they went on and created the high school. And then when they aged out of high school, so that's when the taasuka, the employment section of Sadnat Shiluv, which is where I work, was started. And so they're always thinking ahead, like what's the next stage? Because the whole idea of Sadnat Shiluv is that it is somewhere for them to be for life. It's not like a program that they outgrow or something that's meant to be for a year or two. It's something that if they choose and their families choose, they could be there for the rest of their lives. So Sadnat Shiluv actually has three components. There's the high school for special needs.How many kids are there now? Young people?I'm not actually sure.I mean, dozens, tens, 100?I would say dozens, although I don't remember the exact numbers for the school. And then there's the taasuka, the employment for those who are beyond the age of high school, which starts at 22 and above. And so once you're in the taasuka, the employment part of Sadnat Shiluv. That's when you move into the apartments of Sadnat Shiluv. Sadnat Shiluv has 10 apartments, seven of which are in Gva'ot, and three which are in nearby Yeshuvim. And those apartments are a part and parcel of being in Sadnant Shiluv, although there are a few individuals who, for one reason or another, live at home with their families who live somewhere nearby.And everybody who lives in the apartments is part of Sadnat Shiluv.Correct. But these apartments are interspersed, mainly in Gva'ot, like I said, and some of them are nearby yeshuvim, very much part of the ideology that it's Shiluv. Shiluv means integration.So Sadnat Shiluv would mean like an integration project or an integration workshop or something like that.Exactly. Right. So the special needs people who live in these apartments are very much integrated into the yeshuvim. One of the loveliest things that I've been there now for years, but certainly when I first got there, I was so taken by it. And to this day, I think it's just beautiful, is that the interaction with them is completely and totally natural. You see the kids of the issue of interacting with the special needs, people who live there, and they don't blink, they don't think twice. It's completely, completely natural. On Shabbatot, when they're in their apartment, sometimes they do go home for Shabbat, But when they're in their apartments, they go to families for meals. The family sometimes come to them for Kiddush and Shabbat. And as I've heard a lot of the people who live there say, Okay, so I have a family living on the right side of me, and I have an apartment with special needs, people living on the other side of me, and sometimes I go to them for a cup of flour, and sometimes I go to them for a cup of flour, and there's really no difference. Everybody just works together.How many of them live in an apartment?It's not exactly the same with each apartment. The apartment is also very in size. I'd say it's somewhere between 4 to 8 in an apartment, depending.They live on their own, or is there somebody living with them who helps them out?Most of the apartments have both what they call a rakaz, which is a coordinator of the apartment, and also madrichim, like counselors for the apartments. The rakaz oversees the apartment, and the madrichim, which there tend to be a a few of them for each apartment, they're the ones who are with them on the day to day.So there's always a madrich, like sleeping there at night or during the day.Correct. For most of the apartments. And depending on their level of functioning, so the madrichim do more or less, depending on what they need. In some of the apartments, they have the madrichim, but they're capable of making dinner for themselves. And the madrichim are just there to be there and help them and whatever. There are, I think, two apartments where they're more are independent, where there's a rakaz who oversees things, but there's no day to day madrich. So that if there's an emergency, so they can be in touch with the rakaz, but their functioning level is high enough that they're able to manage even without a madrich, there's nobody sleeping within there at night, et cetera. Obviously, people are checking in and making sure that everything's fine, but their functioning level is that much higher, so they're able to function more independently.So given the era in which we're having this conversation, I can't help but ask. I mean, Gush Etzion didn't have as many sirens as we had here in Jerusalem, but you had your share of sirens, and some of them, I imagine, I don't remember anymore who was what, where, but I imagine some of them were in the middle of the night. So these apartments where there's nobody living with them, how did they function? Do they have in their apartment? Do they have in their buildings? How did they handle it? I mean, it's very frightening if you don't understand exactly what's going on. Right.So first of all, everything is explained to them ahead of time and explained and explained again. So clearly, Those apartments where there are lower functioning, and there's a madrich, so the madrich, obviously, is going to be there to help out more. Not every apartment has a mamad. Some of them do. Whatever didn't have a mamad has something else, like a, like a other shelter, a little shelter. Right, nearby. When the war with Iran began and things were that much more intense and that much more scary, so they actually had to improve the shelters because they realized that they weren't, because the missiles from Iran were somewhat more substantial. And also during the more intense periods, at the beginning of the war, almost two years ago, and during the weeks of the Iran war. So then there was more, for example, at least in one of the apartments where they're usually independent. So they moved in with the nearby other apartment so they could be together with them and not have to deal with the stuff while on their own.How did they fare, these people who are struggling to be independent and probably taking great pride, I would imagine, in being independent and the accomplishments that that entails and requires to a situation that none of us really understood. And we were all a little bit scared at the very minimum, and we didn't know what was happening. And we had grandchildren thrown into our laundry room because that's also our safe room. It was scary for them, even though they had their parents with them. Do you see any residual? It wasn't that long ago, right? It was just a few weeks ago, they were on war. How do they feel? How do their parents, I guess, worry about them a lot and feel very comforted? I would guess that they're at Sadnat Shiluv. How did they feel? And what do you see in the aftermath?Okay, I'll start with the last. In the aftermath, I feel like we slip back into whatever normal is these days pretty quickly. During that time period, so I guess there was a certain amount of keeping an eye on them a little bit more, which I think helped them feel more secure. I wasn't present with every group, but with the ones that I spent time with during that time period, because part of the time, we actually weren't doing our usual work. We were with them in their apartments because of the the rules, the security rules at the time. So they were okay. I mean, they were concerned, and they would talk about it, but it's a very open environment. Things are spoken about very openly. So if you're nervous about something, you don't have to hide it. You talk about it. And obviously, we're able to tell if somebody looks like they're not in a good place. So things are dealt with pretty openly and pretty quickly, at least in with the group that I was with. I didn't see anything dramatically that anybody was having a really hard time dealing with the situation.And the families of these young people, are they all from the Gush or Jerusalem area, or do they come to Sadnat Shiluv from all over the country.In this school, which are still high school-age, and they're not living in the apartment, so I would say, I don't know where every single one of them is from, but they're all easy commuting distance. For the ones who live in the apartments who are in the in the employment, so they come from all over. I mean, a lot of them just by the virtue of the fact that it's local and people know about it, so a lot of them are from this school.A lot of them came through the high school, I would guess, right?Yeah. So there is a certain percentage that are from local families, but there are also plenty who come from other places.So I know that this isn't your field, specifically what I'm about to ask you, but still probably by hearsay and being part of this community. What's the story in Israel in general? I'll give you an example. We have friends who live in the States who had a few kids, but one of them was born with down syndrome. Sounds a little bit like this Hanan boy. And they had him. He was He was pretty low functioning. These are extraordinary people, his parents, but he was pretty low functioning. And for a while, they had him in a place where he lived and that helped educate him and care for him and so on and so forth. And then he aged out of it. I think at 22, if I'm not mistaken. And he couldn't in the state that they live in, age, quote unquote, back in until he was 40. He's in his early 40s now. So there was a period of 18 years where he moved back into the house, which was obviously very hard on the parents, very disruptive. But there are two people with two careers, and he's a young man who needed tremendous amount of support and oversight.And I always felt whenever I hear their story, that's just crazy. I mean, we were talking about the United States of America, and there's a lot of down syndrome people. There's a lot of people with special needs. And the idea that somebody can age out of a program, and these are very sophisticated, educated people who know how to use the system and find resources. There was just nothing for this young man for 18 years, and he lived at home. And now they're living a life again because he's in his early 40s, and he's in an incredible place for him. How is Israel on this score? I'm sure you hear by hearsay. If Sadnat Shiluv didn't exist, for example, what else is there out there for these kinds of kids.Okay. So I'm not an expert as you pointed out. I mostly know what I know, again, because I work this, so I hear about other things. I don't know everything. I do know that there are other places that are similar. For example, there was someone who was in the bakery with me who his parents decided that he would move to this other place, mostly because his sister is there, and it was just easier for them to have everybody in one place. I know that it's not exactly the same. It doesn't run exactly the same way, but it's a similar type of idea. I do actually know of another place. I'm not sure what level of, I believe it's up and running, although I'm not sure. It was actually a nice story that there was a soldier who was doing part of her army service as a guard of the front gate of Sadnat Shiluv. This was like years ago before I was there. And she was very, very left wing and was extremely unhappy that she was placed over the Green Line.In a settlement.In a settlement, right. This was very against her political worldview. But she so fell in love with Sadnat Shiluv. So how did I hear about her? Again, this was before I worked there. My boss said to me, See that woman over there? I was like, Yeah, she brought a group of people. She said she so fell in love with Sadnat Shiluv that she decided to study after her army service special education. And she was now there with this group of people because they wanted to make another place like Sadnat Shiluv, based on her experience and what she saw, which I thought was just such a nice way, a way that a person was able to see beyond something which she saw as other.Other and of an objectionable other.Exactly. And to see beyond that and all the good that's there and to want to recreate it. I just thought that was so nice. I'm not exactly sure where her place is, but apparently there's opening up. I don't know the statistics in terms of, is there enough places like this for everybody who wants it, I don't know. There are other programs that I've heard of also beyond these type of yeshuv-based places. I heard of another place on Kibbutz Yavne, I think. I don't think it's as big a program, but it's also like they integrate people into various workplaces, which seems to be a natural, like a kibbutz seems to be a natural place that you could do that. But again, I don't know the statistics. I do know that I'm asked a lot about Sadnat Shiluv by people, friends of friends of friends who have a child with special needs, and they're interested in hearing about it. And my gut feeling is there isn't enough room in Sadnat Shiluv for everybody who needs it, although there's some spaces, but not a ton. So again, I'm not sure about the greater statistics of it all.You said the youngest person who works with you in the employment part, and the bakery is one of how many parts of the employment?There's a bunch of different branches. I'd have to count on my fingers.Just give us a sense of what are the other ones.There's a kitchen which prepares food, both for us eat for lunch. If there's special programs, they help with that. There's a stables with horses where they give lessons to both.What do you call that? What's the word in English when you say therapy, occupational therapy or writing therapy, that thing. I used to know English.Also regular lessons.There's a stable, there's a kitchen, there's a bakery.There's a bakery. There's the café, the café where they work as waiters and also in the back, helping to prepare food. There's a ceramic studio. There's a gan, the local gan for Gva'ot. It's not a major branch of the employment, but there's one or two women who work there. I'm probably forgetting something.Okay, but that gives us an idea. You said that the youngest person who works with you is 23 and the oldest person is 40. By the way, how old is this young boy, Hanan? Just to give us a sense of help, how time has passed.Now, I don't know exactly how old he is. He must be in his mid to upper 30s.Okay, so this is like a 20-something-year-old program since this woman, who's obviously extraordinary, took him under her wing and decided to really save his life in a real kind of way. These people, you said the older ones were, let's say, late 30s. There's one who's as old as 40.As people think-There are older ones that don't work with me, but work in this.But let's say in their 40s, is there anybody over 50?I don't think so. I think the oldest is in his upper 40s.Okay, but the plan, I guess, and I know you're not sitting out all the time talking about this, but you invariably think out loud with your colleagues. The plan is these people should be able to live their whole lives there.Correct.So they could live into their 80s or beyond or whatever. And people are going to take care. They're going to have a home that they're not going to have to move for in one place to another place or third place. That's their home for life, basically. And their parents can live to 120, but also know that when they're no longer here, that somebody is going to be caring for their kids, emotionally, physically, medically, in every single way.Correct. One of the things which I always found interesting since joining Sadnat Shiluv is that they're always really thinking ahead. Right now, everybody's able to work, but eventually, people are going to get older and not be able to work as well. Or either we'll have to slow down or we'll have to not be able to work at all. And so they're already thinking, what do we do about that? So for example, right now, they're building actually a new, in Hebrew, they call it a mercaz yom, day center, day treatment center. Right. So now there is a mercaz yom now, but it's much smaller. That's usually where the lowest functioning of the Sadnat Shiluv people are, where it's not a full day work, but they have some jobs that they do, and they also have more like activities that they do. But in this new day center, so it would be for those activities, but also for people who might have, let's say, aged out, or let's say Let's put it this way. The mercaz yom would have to get bigger because there'll be more people who won't be able to do a full day's work like they do now. And it's also going to have a place for treatments that people need, I don't know, physical therapy or whatever.As they get older, they're going to need more medical care.Exactly.Is this government-funded? How does this whole thing work? In other words, government funding, private funding, funded by the families of the people who live there. What's the story there?I'm not super expert on the financial side of it. There is the government funding, and there's also a lot of fundraising that goes on. Some people out there in your podcast world might have heard of Swim for Sadna, which is a yearly fundraiser.That's the fundraiser for this?It's a fundraiser for this.Where do they swim?They I've done a swim across the Kinneret every spring.That's a heck of a swim. How long?They don't do actually in the mid of the Kinneret. It's like to the side. But still. There's one, one that's two kilometers and one is four kilometers. They're two different.Still a heck of a swim.That's a pretty well-known thing. For women only, sorry.That's okay. Although it's a big Kinneret, you could have one for men on the other side of the Kinneret.That is true. Actually, my guys in the bakery always say, How come there's no one for the men?People come from abroad. There's the Aline bike ride that everybody's probably heard of that does this. An amazing orthopedic hospital in Jerusalem. It does literally miraculous work. People literally come from all over the world to ride their bikes in this bike ride for Aline, and they raise a lot of money. People come from abroad for the swim for Sadana?There might be some people. I think most people are local. Most are with Israeli. But it's a yearly thing.When is it? In the spring?During the spring, usually sometime a little bit after Shavuot.We should make a point of remembering to do that. We can send out a link so people can sign up if they want to either swim to Israel and then swim in the swim or just fly to Israel. Although these days with Cyprus, a lot of people are boating also. But in any event, okay. So there's private fundraising, there's government money, and the families of the people who are being cared for there don't pay? No. As far as I understand, they do not. That it's all through. And then, right. Yeah.And are the families involved? I mean, families on a typical day, are they coming to visit on a week? Do they come on? And there's not really any weekends in Israel, but especially if Shabbat. But by the way, are all the kids expected to observe Shabbat in some meaningful way? It's a Shabbat environment?Yeah. I mean, it's a religious program.Would they take somebody who wasn't religious?I think they would take someone who's not religious, who's willing to play the game.Part of the community, play the game. Okay.I was going to do that in a more positive spin, but okay. Meaning I assume that that would be okay as long as they're willing to keep Shabbat, which probably would work or not work better or worse, depending a little bit how independently thinking they are. But within the guys who are there, I would say that they do have various opinions about it, but they all keep Shabbat.And they're sophisticated enough to understand. Because there's people at all different levels of cognitive ability.That's great. I think I would pretty sure that they're all have some, some of them completely understand Shabbat. They go to Tefilot on Shabbat, they understand everything completely. And there's some who certainly all of them have some sense of what Shabbat is for sure.How about their families today. There's no real weekend because the families are working on Sunday and Shabbat is Shabbat. But are families part of the experience? Is it typical to see their parents come, their siblings come? Do they go back to their families periodically? How does that whole thing work?Most of them go back every other Shabbat.Oh, okay. So there's a lot of contact with their families.There's at least one more independent apartment where it's like two in, one out because they want it. They want it In other words, it's actually something that I enjoy hearing them talk about. This one guy in the bakery, for example, who's in this independent apartment. He's 30 years old, and he's like, This is my home. I love going back to visit my family, but This is my home. This is the yeshuv. He lives in Kfar Tzion. This is where I live now. This is my community. And I think to myself, okay, that's normal. I would want my 30-year-old son to do the same thing. So that's what he wants.And he could go take a bus? How does he get home?So he's independent enough, as is anybody who lives in that apartment. And even some who live in the somewhat less independent apartments, some of them do take public transportation, a little bit less so these days, because it's certainly during, let's say, the Iran thing. So They were not taking public transportation. But for the most part, those people are capable of taking public transportation, and they go back and forth on their own.There's a lot of contact with their families, and their families are involved.For sure. In terms of parents coming, there's always a couple of times a year where officially they come. Otherwise, the families are always welcome to come. There's nobody keeping them out. I don't think they would want them showing up every day, but certainly the place is open and people are allowed to come and visit. We actually encourage people to come and visit both families and other people just to come and see the place. I can't say that I see tons of parents coming all the time. A lot of it has to do with how far away they live.And they're busy people, too. They have careers and jobs.If they live down the block in Alon Yeshuv, you'll tend to see them more than if they live in high five. Netanya or whatever. As would be logical.So I just want to ask you, it's fascinating to me, and it's very moving. So many of the stories of this, first of all, you're talking about Shiluv, of integration. So the whole Gva'ot community was built with this integration in mind. How many people build a town with this as the core idea of the town? You could say the idea of the town is going to be agricultural, it's going to be religious, or it's going to be artistic, or it's going to be whatever. But this is at the the core of the founding of the idea of a town. I think that just needs to sit out there on its own pedestal for a second. People can get in their heads. Somebody built like a city, a little city, but a city with this idea at its core. That's the first thing that I just think is really amazing. The other thing is this meeting of different groups. Just yesterday, I was actually in the Negev at a high school, also a high school that you're talking about, but a very different one. It's a high school in which Jews and Bedouins teach side by side, and they're teaching Bedouin teenagers and trying to give them Hebrew and integrate them into Israeli society so they can go on to university and whatever.But the whole idea there is also Shiluv. It's also integration. And as the person who I interviewed yesterday made a point of saying, it's not always simple. So for example, Most of these Bedouin kids have family in Gaza. And not my brothers and sisters in Gaza thing, but like my aunt and uncle. These people are not there all that many generations ago. So their grandparents, siblings could very well be alive and be living there. And all of their Jewish faculty went off to war. And as far as these students are concerned, went off to war to basically shoot their family, and then came back and said, now let's keep studying together. Very complicated. But these are people whose lives have been devoted to Shiluv, to integration. And then you have other communities which were founded specifically for the purpose of religious and secular integration. There's lots of those communities, and there's Mechinot, pre-army programs. There's ones that are religious, and there's ones that are agricultural, and there's ones like Hashomer HaHadash, which are about guarding farmlands, and there's ones for religious and secular people together. So I just want to, for our listeners, take this idea of integration.We think of Israel as such a separated society. You think of the Kaplanites, the protesters, versus the Ben Gvir people or whatever. And there is that, of course. But there's so much about this society where so many people have actually devoted their lives to breaking down those barriers, to breaking down those walls, to not pretend that everybody's the same, to not pretend that we're all going to be power of and put in a blender and come out identical, but that we're going to learn to live together. And obviously, the Gva'ot thing and the Sadnat Shiluv is a little bit different because it's not political, religious or anything of the sort. It's just needs. But it's really unbelievably moving. I will knowledge that I have heard via the grapevine that you're not just a good Tanakh teacher, but you're a fabulous Tanakh teacher. I never had the privilege, but I've heard that you're amazing. I just want to begin to wrap up by asking you, this is such not the way that you thought it was going to be. If I had stopped you on Broadway when you were in Barnard College and said, when you're in whatever decade of life you're in now and you're working in a bakery, 116th Street in Broadway, you probably would have chuckled and said, I think you have the wrong woman here. That is not my path. And here it is. And you're unbelievably You're talented, you're gifted, you know the educational world inside. Now, you can be doing a lot of different things, and you're doing this. I'm just at this very critical time, a painful time. I think even an exhausted time in Israeli society, just as they say, that time when you put your head on your pillow before you go to La La land. What's all this do for you? What's it done for your soul, for your family, for your kids?You have another hour?Yeah, I have plenty of tape.Okay. There are a few thoughts that come through my mind. First of all, when I was sent that WhatsApp by my friend, this might interest you. I think that friend was thinking and I think that it's correct, that this job is in some ways a very nice, in a different way, integration of education and baking. Now, it's not teaching Tanakh. Sometimes we discuss Prashat Shavua over lunch, but there is that educational aspect. So that, first of all, is there. But in terms of what it gives me, well, there are so many things. So one thing, for example, is I've had a lot of jobs, and a lot of them I've enjoyed back when I was in the teaching world, some more, some less, like any range of jobs. One of the things that I found hard, if I'm going to be honest, when I was in the teaching world was that I felt that there was a lot of constant competition. Can you be a superstar? Can you be that dazzling bright whatever that somehow everyone is going to to hire? That was hard for me, I have to admit. I felt that sometimes I just couldn't come up with it.Sometimes you have to be more a performer than a teacher, and you end up doing with your time what you don't want to really be doing.Exactly. It was a lot of, can I outshine that person? That was not something I enjoyed so much. That was an aspect of I did not enjoy so much. In Sadnat Shiluv, you have amazing, amazing human beings working there. I mean, I sometimes feel like, what the heck am I doing there? Like, truly amazing people. And there is no aspect of I'm doing this because I want to get credit. I'm doing this because I want to outshine somebody else. It just doesn't exist. I'll give you an example. My husband was looking at a pamphlet that somebody made. We had the It was pictures of the wild flowers around the Gva'ot. And it was used as an educational tool. So when we're doing little hikes and things, we'll see a flower, and we know the name of the flowers. And he looked at it and he said, do you know who made this? I'm like, I think I might know. I can guess, but I'm not sure. And he said, It's remarkable. You would never see this somewhere else where it didn't have the name of the person who made it. There wouldn't be information about Sadnat Shiluv on the back. And I'm like, Yeah, that's Sadnat Shiluv. Someone did it because there was a need for it, but they're not there because they need to have their name on it. And that's a lovely place to work, right? Where you just do, there are people doing amazing things, and people recognize that you're doing good things also. But there's no need to be constantly talking about that all the time. And that's something that I find is very good for my soul.This is a competitive society. I mean, our kids see this from an early age. Certainly getting in certain army units literally rips their souls out and hurts their bodies. But they will do crazy things to get into these army units. And then certain university programs are very competitive. The high tech world is very competitive, and medicine is very competitive. I mean, it's a competitive society with a very capitalist side to it. And you're talking about a bomb for the soul, which is completely the opposite of that. It's very moving, I have to say.And another thing, which might be a couple of things I have to think this through, which I think was very good for me and speaks a lot about what Sadnat Shiluv is. It's basically a place that's based on two ideas. I'm not saying that this is in their official description, but this is what I find. Number one is that you have to meet the person as they are, which would seem obvious, I guess, when you're working with special needs people. But I'll explain a little bit of the process that I went through in order to explain this. So first of all, when I first worked there, when I first showed up the first day of work, one of the things that amazed me from day one was how automatically they turn into people like everybody else, meaning what do I mean by that? So when you see people in the outside world who obviously have special needs, sometimes you don't know how to talk to them, to deal with them. I'm sure there are some people who do, but unless you have a reasonIt can be awkward.Right. And if you don't necessarily have a context in which to interact with them, you don't. So right away, these people became people. And sometimes, for example, people with special needs also have physical characteristics that look a little different. You might even say they look a little strange in some cases. So in the first day, I walked in and I would see she looks a little bit strange, or in my mind, I would think about these physical characteristics. I look at them now, and it's not as if I don't know that they look different, but I don't think about that anymore.You don't notice it anymore.That's so and so, and that's her. I think of them in terms of being people like everybody else. And to me, that's just a wonderful thing. We joke a lot at work that everybody has special needs, including us. Which I think is true. But I really think there is a lot of truth to it. You see, okay, their needs might be more extreme, but it's really the same. So that's one thing. And I think that when I first started working with them, and I realized this, so then I said, okay, this is cool. I can talk to them and work with them like I would work with anybody else. And my expectations will be, obviously within their capabilities, but would also be like that. And that worked very well for a while. And then I found myself at a certain point, I would get certain frustrations because you would try to explain something to one of them, and they just weren't getting it. And I'm not talking about technicalities, what they have to do in the baker is more in terms of, let's say, behavioral things or whatever, or how they were treating one another. And then a certain point, you realize, okay, They just can't get it. There's something there that isn't going to click. And that's when you realize, okay, meeting someone where they're, shiluv, it doesn't necessarily mean treating them like everybody else. It means meeting them where they are, basically. Meeting them where they are, treating them like a person as they are. And once I made that switch, it was much easier to deal with those things that were getting very frustrating because I was like, okay, I just can't use that approach because it's just not going to work. It's not going to be banging my head against the wall.You have to do a different approach. And once you do that, it really is accepting them for what they are. And then you're able to get back into your routine of working with them. So that's one thing that I think is, if you're talking about a broader Israeli society, we all talk about we want people to We're one big Am Israel, and that's something that's extremely important to me. But that doesn't mean that everybody else is going to start being like me. It means that I have to accept them for what they are. Some of the things are going to overlap, but not everything is. So I think about that a lot, that what we go through at Sadant Shiluv in terms of acceptance could be true about accepting anybody who's different than you, right? You're not going to become me. That's not why I enjoy working with you. I enjoy working with you because I understand you now, and we can figure this out. We can work together, even if your way of thinking about something isn't exactly the way I think about something. And the other thing which I think is part of our daily work, which I think is it's good for my soul, and I think it could be good for anybody's soul, is in a lot of other jobs, and I found this in teaching, and I'm sure it's even more so in more high pressure professions. There's that constant pressure of, I've got to get it perfect. And even if you're accepted for a job where they say, Oh, there's a learning curve, and we don't expect to get it perfectly right away, they don't always mean that. They say it, but they don't really mean it. But here they really mean it because the entire job is, Okay, perfect is off the table. We're doing our best. If we don't get to our best today, well, there's always another loaf of bread tomorrow. And that also is very, I find healthy. I don't need everything to work out perfectly. And beyond the baking, every activity I do with them, if we're putting on a little play, I don't know for Jerusalem Day, but what it might be, it doesn't have to come out perfectly. That doesn't matter. What matters is that they learned something, that we enjoyed something together, and maybe next time we could take it up a notch. But that, I feel, is a healthy thing, which you don't find in every other type of work.Yeah, it would actually, I think, be incredibly beautiful if we could clone this and spread it throughout Israeli society, some mist you'd spray from a plane. Okay, so what's the word we need, to meet each other where are, to understand that we don't have to make them into us, and we're not going to become them. We have to learn to make this work together. As I started out by saying at the very beginning of this conversation, which I really learned a lot from, so I'm very grateful. It's a tough time here, and there's a lot of ugliness in the air. There's a lot of ugliness in the news. There's a lot of ugliness on the streets. There's certainly horror going on across the border. Horror. My wife and I were just yesterday down near the Otef, and the sounds of the explosions, you forget. You and I were sitting in Baca, or at my dining room table or having a nice little chat. Can't actually hear it. Yeah, you could hear it in the Gush. The ground was shaking. So these were enormous explosions. And you just forget. There's a real life, real war going on there and tragedy on both sides of the divide. And it's a painful time.

And to hear about these pockets, and they're much more than pockets. There's so many of them that it's more than a pocket, but nuclei of just pure goodness, of wanting to help other people, building a yeshuv around this idea. Somebody like you who had a really amazing career in education and teaching Bible and so forth, going ahead and actually doing this with her life. It's really, I think, what makes Israel Israel. And it's the thing that is very hard for me to imagine happening in a lot of other places, maybe any other place. And it's just one of those things that gives for me, at least, hope and a sense of belief in Am Israel and what the people of this country can actually do. And for telling us about it, I'm sure that 99% of the people who listened to you today didn't even know this place existed and had no idea that these kinds of things happened in Israel.Everybody's welcome to come to visit. And we'll put up links how they can find it and find out information. But they're going to probably whatever time of the day they listen to this, they're going to spend the rest of the day thinking, there's some really great things. And it's a relief from the normal, is the government going to fall? Are the hostages coming home? Please God, they do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's a breath of fresh air, and it's a dose of much-needed oxygen. So Ilana Sacks, thank you very, very much for taking the time.My pleasure.I wish you continued hatzlaha and success in your work. And hopefully, the model that you represent come to represent more and more and more of the society that we love and care about.Amen.

So, what is the agenda for today’s cabinet meeting? There are two items on the list, according to the press:

* Beefing up Netanyahu’s security detail, due to increased warnings of threats on his life

* Whether or not to fire the Attorney General.

What to do about Gaza, the hostages, Hamas, and our plummeting image will (perhaps) be discussed later in the week.

Does the government not “get it”?

Some people think not. The press did, at least until the hostage videos. On Friday, Yedi’ot ran an article about our international isolation. Even without translation, a look at the graphic kind of makes the point.

AVALANCHE, says the large black headline.

And to the right of that black headline, here’s the sub-headline:

The forecasts in Israel were different, but more and more countries are joining the initiative launched by France. ⚫️Even Germany, a stalwart ally, announced that “the process of recognizing a Palestinian state must begin.” ⚫️ In all, 162 countries support the initiative or are considering it. ⚫️ But in Israel, other than criticizing the declarations, no one is suggesting any alternatives.

A few days ago, I was having a conversation with Howard Wolfson of the Bloomberg Philanthropies (as I mention in the recording, we were actually talking about the relative merits of two recent translations of Homer’s Odyssey), when he raised the issue of the permanent damage that Israel is causing itself, even among Americans.

His sense of urgency was so profound that I asked him to share his message with us, and with Israel’s leaders.

Howard Wolfson is the Education program lead of Bloomberg Philanthropies. In this role, he oversees the Philanthropies’ career and technical education, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and college access and success portfolios.

Wolfson is also instrumental in the policy and political universe of Mike Bloomberg, running his SuperPAC and advising him on politics and communication.

From 2010 to 2013, Wolfson was the New York City Deputy Mayor for Government Affairs and Communications. In this capacity, Wolfson oversaw local, state and federal government relations in addition to helping to craft the Bloomberg Administration’s overall communications strategy. He was particularly involved in the education, transportation, and technology sectors.

Wolfson served as the communications director for Hillary Clinton’s history-making run for the presidency in 2008. He has worked in and out of government, serving as Chief of Staff to Congresswoman Nita Lowey, and as the Executive Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Wolfson has worked on campaigns at every level of government, advising Charles Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Andrew Cuomo, among others.

Wolfson, a New York native, graduated from the University of Chicago and received a Master’s in history from Duke University.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

We're going to do something today that I don't believe we've ever done before. We're going to reverse directions, making an exception only because of the urgency of the message we're going to hear. Instead of trying to share with people outside Israel what Israelis are thinking about and feeling, we're going to share with Israelis what is happening to the image of Israel in the hearts and souls of many of those abroad who for a long time were among Israel's staunchest advocates. We're doing this because the case we're going to hear today is more than a curiosity. It cuts to the very security and possibly survival of the State of Israel, which made sharing it feel to me at least, not optional, but an imperative. My guest today is Howard Wolfson. We'll put up a full bio in the notes for today, but very briefly.Howard Wolfson is the Education Program Lead of Bloomberg Philanthropies. In this role, he oversees the philanthropy's efforts in education at all levels. Howard is also instrumental in the policy and political universe of Mike Bloomberg, running his super PAC and advising him on politics and communication. From 2010 to 2013, Howard Wolfson was the New York City Deputy Mayor for Government affairs and Communications. He was Communications director for Hillary Clinton's history making run for the presidency in 2008. He has serves the Chief of Staff to Congresswoman Nita Lowy and as the Executive Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The list of accomplishments really goes on and as I mentioned, we will post it in the notes for today's conversation. Bottom line though, Howard Wolfson knows American politics and the American electorate about as well as anyone on the planet. And I will simply add that I've known Howard for a while and most of our conversations have been about Israel in some way, shape, manner or form. And I can attest that Howard is a person who cares deeply about the State of Israel, loves the state of Israel, whose loyalties to the State of Israel, and that will become increasingly important as he begins to speak.Howard and I were on a call yesterday, completely unrelated to this. At a certain point in our conversation, actually we were speaking about the relative merits of Emily Wilson's and Daniel Mendelsohn's translations of Homer's Odyssey and about Mendelsohn's 2017 book about exploring the Odyssey with his father. Those are the kinds of conversations that are very good for the soul in these troubled and troubling times. But as often happens these days, days our conversation eventually meandered to events in the Middle east, at which point Howard shared with me that he has grave concerns over what is happening to Israel's image across the American political spectrum. He told me that he wondered whether Israel's leaders truly understand how dire Israel's situation is and how what's transpiring now could have grave consequences for Israel's most basic security. Howard told me a bit about what he was thinking, and though I assume that many of Israel's leaders have heard at least some of this, perhaps they haven't heard it all, and they certainly have not heard it expressed this way. I asked Howard if he would share his message with us with a promise that I would do what I could to get it to Israel's highest echelons. He agreed and joins us today. So, Howard, welcome to Israel from the inside, even if today it's more like to Israel from the outside. Thank you for taking the time and for what you're about to share with us. Let's set the stage. Let's imagine that you are sitting at a very large conference table, and around this conference table, along with you, are the Prime Minister, Ron Dermer, other leading members of the cabinet, the multiple heads of Israel's very complex security apparatus, those responsible for telling Israel's story abroad, and more. And let's imagine that this is one of those instances that they were actually willing to listen to someone. Why don't you tell us what it is that you would tell them?So thank you for that introduction. Thank you for having me. I guess I would start by saying that I come with some humility, and I come in love, humility, because I'm an American, I'm not an Israeli. I haven't given my life over to defending the state of Israel. And I know that the people in the room that you've imagined or many of your listeners have considerably more at stake than I do around this conversation. But I do come in love. I come as a lifelong Zionist, as the son and grandson of Zionists, as someone who believes very deeply in the state of Israel and has significant concerns about what I am seeing that I would like to share. Quite simply, I believe that at least as pertains to the United States, and I think even more dramatically In Western Europe, although with less consequence, the war for hearts and minds here has been lost. And while that is a war that is largely fought online, the implications for Israel's security in real life are quite significant. Let me just quickly stipulate two things that I hope we can all agree. American support for Israel's security is critically important to Israel's well being.That's one and two. Since America is a democracy, that support is subject to public opinion. It's not immutable. And the reality here is that public opinion is shifting very quickly and very dramatically away from Israel. Gallup, which is the sort of gold standard polling company in the United States and in other places as well, asks Americans every year what they think of Israel. And as recently as 2014, more than 70% of Democrats had a favorable view of Israel, which is pretty good. Even as recently as just before the October 7th attacks, 60% of Democrats were favorable towards Israel, also pretty good. Today that number is a third. And it's even worse among young Democrats. Okay, so maybe you just say, and I can imagine some in the room that you've envisioned saying this, that's just Democrats. They don't like Israel. Now, to be clear, that was not the case just a few years ago. But okay, let's look at independents who make up an increasingly large share of the US Electorate. And there too, support has fallen dramatically. Less than half of independents now have a favorable view of Israel. And even among younger Republicans, Israel is losing support. In 2022, 63% of Republicans under 50 had a positive view of Israel. And now they are roughly split with 50% negative, 48% positive. And among Gen Z Republicans, it's even worse. So I think that we are at a crossroads. Israel is at a crossroads. Now you and others, Danny, have had many discussions with rabbis and people who are considerably smarter and more learned than me to discuss the morality and the implications of what is happening in Gaza. And those conversations are really important. But I'm not a rabbi, I'm not a philosopher. I'm more or less a political hack. My background is in politics and in American public opinion. But I do know something about that. And it's in that context that I am clanging the alarm bell as loudly as I can and hoping that the Israeli public and the decision makers in Israel understand how far Israel has fallen in public approval in the United States and what the implications of that are. I realize it is not the only strategic. It's not the only strategic question that Israel needs to consider, but it is my sense that they're barely considering it at all. And that, to me, feels like either they don't understand what's happening or they don't understand the implications of what's happening. And I've got a little bit of a megaphone here with you, and I want to say it as loudly and clearly as I can.Well, first of all, thank you for doing that, and thank you for doing it in such stark terms. Let's try to push this a little bit further so people can understand. Let's assume that everything that you're saying is right and you're obviously using figures that are from very reputable places. How does this play out? Now, I'm going to split the question into two parts. Let's leave the personality of the president, presidents and vice president right now out of the question, out of the picture, just as you see it. And the American public opinion moves away from Israel. How does this play out in a way that Israelis should care about? Why should Israelis not mutter over their falafel, you know, well, I don't care what Americans think of me. You know, whatever. We need America in a lot of different kinds of ways. But I think it would be very helpful for people to listen and to hear you, who've been so internal to the political process in so many ways, explain to Israelis, here's why you need America. And I'm sure that Bibi Netanyahu and Ron Dermer and the chief of staff, they all get this, but we're obviously speaking not only to them, we're speaking to a much larger group.So number one is, okay, so they don't like us. That's unfortunate. We like to be liked, all of us. But what's really at stake, I guess second question is I'll just put out three, and then you can take them. And if you forget them, I'll hope I won't forget them. And then we can. We can see the second one is a lot of Israelis will say, you know what? I don't really care what people think. I don't even care what Congress thinks, because we. We've got Donald Trump and Donald Trump, whatever I think of him in other areas, he's doing the right thing for us. He's supporting us, he's supporting Bibi. He did the right thing with the B2s at Fordow for whatever reasons. Donald Trump is in our camp, so why should I be worried? That's question number two. And question number three is you said Israel is basically losing the war. The war may be lost. And I guess my follow up question to the war being lost, which I believe was how you put it, but I could be wrong, is let's imagine Israel has elections either before they're scheduled in October 26' or when they're scheduled in October 26'.And a very different kind of personality takes the helm in Israel, which is by no means guaranteed, by the way. By no means guaranteed. But let's imagine, I mean Yair Lapid which is not going to happen. Naftali Benet, which is perhaps going to happen. Who knows? Is all the damage that has been caused reparable? So A, why should I care? B, isn't Donald Trump my insurance policy against having to care? And C, if the war has been lost for opinion, can the war be re won over the course of time?So all great questions and just to be clear, when I say the war is lost, I'm talking about the war for hearts and minds. In many ways, Israel has had spectacular military battles and you know, we have to think about those in a different context. But the war for hearts and minds. Let me take your second question first. So Donald Trump has occasionally mused about running for a third term. He's not constitutionally eligible to do that. I think given his age and the constraints on him, it's unlikely that he will be president. After four years, there will be a new American president. The Democratic Party, as we've discussed, has really shifted away from Israel. And it's possible and even I think likely that there will be any number of Democrats who are running for president who will be considerably less inclined to be helpful to Israel than, let's say Joe Biden was. But even if you get a Republican to replace Donald Trump, there's no evidence that that Republican would be as favorable to Israel as let's say Donald Trump has been. If you believe that Donald Trump has.Been, or at least as Donald Trump has been until this point. Because that could also change.Correct. You know, Donald Trump's views change and his vice president, J.D. Vance, who I think will probably be the leading frontrunner for the Republican nomination, doesn't seem to have the same kinds of feelings towards Israel that Donald Trump does. He is much more an American firster when you listen to him talk about foreign policy in Israel. He is far less sympathetic to Israel than, let's say, his boss than Donald Trump is. And I don't think there's any indication that he would be nearly as favorable towards Israel as Trump has been. So Trump is not king. He is not going to be president forever, there will be a new president. And I think there's every reason to believe that based on the current trajectory, that that president will not be nearly as favorable as both Joe Biden was and as Donald Trump has been. So that's the first question. Why does it matter? So, you know, look, Israel is in many respects a spectacularly strong nation. It has a strong economy, startup nation. But, you know, as we have seen in the last couple of years, at critical moments, it has depended on American military power.It has depended on American arms, both in terms of resupplying what Israelis need on the ground, and at critical moments, it has depended on American ships to shoot down Iranian missiles. So when Joe Biden stationed American naval vessels in the Mediterranean off the coast of Israel, those vessels were used to help shoot down Iranian missiles. And of course, we know what Donald Trump just did at Fordow and in Iran. That matters. You know, there are people who understand the military implications of this far more than I do. But I have read in many places that many more Israelis would have suffered injury or even death at the hands of, or as the result of the Iranian missile barrage had the United States not been aggressively engaged in taking those missiles out. Now, again, Israel's got a lot of strength. Israel's got a lot of equities. My guess is that there are people in Israel who are thinking about what, what they will need to do to become more self sufficient if the United States were to walk away. I think that those kinds of conversations, by the way, are happening all across the world. You're certainly seeing it in Western Europe where England, France, Poland, other countries are wondering, can we continue to count on the United States?What do we need to do to become more self sufficient? Germany, certainly those kinds of conversations are occurring. I'm sure they're beginning to occur in Israel. But you'd probably not want to depend on a world in which the United States was essentially absent from providing arms and assistance to Israel. And I think on the current trajectory, you could imagine a situation in which that becomes more rather than less likely. And so, you know, Donald Trump's not going to be around forever. I think, I think, I hope most Israelis understand that there is a, that they, there is a value to a strong U.S-Israel relationship that helps maintain Israeli military strength and. Sorry, Dan, what was your third question?The third question is if somebody replaces Bibi Netanyahu in October 26 elections, which is not a foregone conclusion, he is going to run for another term. That's pretty clear. Like what's going to perhaps be the case in America. And he could very well win. But let's assume for a minute that he doesn't win. And let's just take a guy who I think everybody thought was, you know, handled him, comported himself reasonably. You know, you could love his policies or not love his policies. You could believe him because he did not exactly stand by his promises about who he would be in a coalition with. But Naftali Benet's like a decent guy. He's never been accused of being rabidly right wing, rabidly left wing. He's never been accused of graft or anything of the sort. Let's just say hypothetically that it's a Naftali Benet kind of person who, who is more palatable to international leaders and maybe strikes people as a little bit less problematic on the personal level than Bibi. Can Israel repair the damage that's been done with Republicans, young Republicans, Democrats and young Democrats and all those independents that you mentioned?Well, some of it will require a change in behavior, right. So it's certainly not automatic. I mean, I do think that there are some Democrats who respond negatively towards Israel just because Bibi Netanyahu is the prime minister and they so deeply dislike Bibi Netanyahu. So his departure could change that dynamic. I wouldn't quite say overnight, but quickly. But I think it goes beyond that. It goes deeper than that. And there are a set of challenges that I think Israel will face whoever the next president is and whoever the next prime minister is. And those challenges are being very much exacerbated by what is happening in Gaza now. And I don't think they are easily repaired. I worry that if we continue on this course, if Israel continues on this course, the change may be permanent. And, you know, I suppose my message is very respectfully, because again, it's very easy to sit in Manhattan and opine on these issues very respectfully to Israelis. First, please understand what is happening in the United States. Don't pretend it's not happening, don't ignore it, recognize that it's happening, and please understand the implications of it. And as I said, it's not clear to me that those things are happening.I mean, when I talk to friends in Israel, people are understandably more focused on what's happening on the ground in Israel. And it's not clear to me that they fully understand how much public opinion has shifted against Israel in the United States because traditionally the United States was so pro Israel. So please understand this is happening and this is not. Nobody's crying wolf here. This is very clear public opinion polling and that there are real world implications to it. It's not, oh, who cares whether they don't like us? It matters if you assume that Israel isn't completely self sufficient. It matters what the United States public opinion is about Israel.Well, by the way, I think we just point out it's very obvious, but Israel is not completely self sufficient. There has been, as you know and as you alluded to before, a tremendous amount of hand wringing about how we got ourselves into a situation where we're not manufacturing our own bombs and munitions and we can be held not hostage. That's a bad word to use. But pressured deeply by the threat of weapons not coming. But just to give people an idea, since October 7th, the United States has provided Israel with 14,000, 2,000 pound bombs and it's provided Israel with a hundred bunker buster bombs and it's provided Israel with 50,000 artillery shells. I mean, that's just a small part of the list. If you go on any place online you can see it and Israel, America's, America has basically provided the weapons with which we fought these wars. So Israel can manufacture a bit of this and a bit of that. But we are clear, very dependent on America. And I think that the, the warning is, is, is very, very important. And it's, by the way, not only important to the people sitting around the proverbial conference table that we've imagined for ourselves.Israeli citizens need to understand it because they're the ones who are going to go to the polls and they're the ones who can actually pressure the government even in the short run before there are elections. You know, you and I, Howard, had this conversation yesterday. First we're talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then we talked about all kinds of much less pleasant things and we agreed to have this conversation this morning. When I got this morning's paper in the Yediot Ahronot on the front page there is actually a letter from Jake Sullivan. Jake Sullivan has actually written a public letter to the Israeli public saying something. I haven't read it in full yet. It's very long. I understand that it's been translated in English online, people can probably find it. But again, you're not the only person with a huge background in American politics who cares deeply about Israel who's starting to say, I've got to ring this bell loud and clear. So when there's people like you and Jake Sullivan, I presume others follow, who are saying to Israeli officials and to the Israeli Rank and file. Something very dangerous is happening in this really sacred relationship with the American Jewish, with the American political world and the Israeli Jewish community. It's really critically important to say I really appreciate it. Is there anything else that you want to add by way of rounding this out or want to leave it with that for our listeners?Yeah, I guess. Look, and you touched on this. There is this sense that I know Israelis have that the world is against us and it will always be against us. And antisemitism has existed for thousands of years, and this is just more of that. And I know in some senses, antisemitism is kind of the background noise of our lives, and it's always a factor. And. And that is true. And, you know, people can debate the morality of this war, and people do, and they have. But what I'm suggesting is people think about the actual practical implications of what's happening. Put aside what's fair, put aside what's accurate. You know, nations have been waging information warfare and propaganda campaigns for as long as there has been warfare, but they're not sideshows. Right. They're integral to success and failure. And right now, in my view, Israel is getting absolutely decimated in that arena. And that may not be fair, it may not be accurate, but I think those questions of fairness and accuracy, they've become largely irrelevant. It's not about fairness and accuracy. It's about effectiveness and about impact. And from where I sit, Israel, you know, has two stated war aims, defeat Hamas and recover its hostages. And I support both of those things. But I would add a third important war aim, which is don't lose the United States in the process. Don't lose the United States in the process. And right now, it's not clear to me that Israel has a plan, frankly, to accomplish any of those things, but certainly the thirdI unfortunately agree with you, I certainly agree about the war in Gaza seeming to have no plan. There's no progress on the hostages. And I agree there's not even a person you can point to in Israel and say, oh, she or he is the person who's supposed to be coordinating this effort. There's not even that she or he person. At least there is a chief of staff. At least there is a person who's responsible for the hostage thing. Whether it's working or not is a separate question. We don't even really have a person responsible for this, and Israelis know that. But I think you've brought home to us in a very clear way how critically important this is and how dire could be the consequences if we don't begin to take this very, very, very seriously. It's a very sobering message to hear a day or two after Tisha Be'Av, after the 9th of AV, when we commemorate destructions of the past, we cannot afford a destruction in the future. And in order to avoid one, we have to be very, very, very smart and strategic. And Howard Wolfson, for helping us understand a very significant part of the picture that we need to appreciate my thank you. My gratitude for your for your forthrightness, for being willing to convey a painful message and for your time on this. And I look forward to the next time that you and I speak. We'll talk a little bit more about Homer, and hopefully the news from the Middle east will be much, much better. Thanks again.Thank you. Appreciate it.

Rather than let anger get the better of him, though, Matan was moved to create a program that would give young Bedouin in the Negev hope, the possibility of a different future. He founded Desert Stars, which has since grown tremendously and is about to move to a brand new campus.

Desert Stars is now run by Ariel Wiezel, who in our conversation today raises the sorts of complexities that many of us might not think about when we think about Israeli Jews teaching Israeli Bedouin. Most of the Bedouin youth, for example, have real family in Gaza. So when their Jewish teachers are called to reserve duty and then return to school, in the eyes of their students, they have just come from waging war on their family. It does not make for easy going.

But the leaders and funders of Desert Stars were never looking for easy—they are looking to make a difference. In today’s conversation, we hear about the dream that Jewish Israelis have for the Bedouin who live amongst them, and what they’re doing to help that dream come to fruition.

As the sign on the Desert Stars gate below says to its students as they arrive, “This house wouldn’t be complete without you.” Until Desert Stars, how many times had Bedouin in the Negev ever heard that sentiment from Jewish Israelis?

Change—and hope—are in the air, at a time when we need them both, urgently.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Ariel Wiezel was born on Kibbutz Netiv Halamed-Hey and currently lives in Kvutzat Shiller. He served in the Israeli Air Force. He has over 20 years of experience in education, non-profit organizations, and educational projects. Of these, 10 years were with the “Aharai!” organization in various roles. “Aharai!” is a youth movement dedicated to empowering young people from Israel’s social and geographic periphery, promoting equality, and expanding their opportunities. Afterwards, he worked at the Association for the Advancement of Education, developing projects in the Arab community. For the last six years he has been part of Desert Stars, serving in the last two years as CEO. Ariel is 45 and has three children.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

On a couple of occasions in Israel from the inside, we've had occasion to interview Matan Yaffe. Matan interviewed with us first a while back, maybe a year or two, when he was running a program called Kochabei HaMidbar, Desert Stars, which is a program that he founded after a fascinating incident, which he's shared with us several times, where a couple of few Bedouin kids went after him when he was on a motorcycle, but he had a weapon, he took it out, and he went home that night and says to us that he said to himself, This is ridiculous. Our relationship shouldn't be them attacking me and me having a weapon. We got to change their future. And over the course of time, he built a program called Kochabei HaMidbar Desert Stars, which was to take young Bedouin youth, where I'm actually situated right now talking to Ariel, to whom we'll get in a minute, where they take young Bedouin people to try to integrate them more into Israeli society and to give them a future. We're going to hear more about that program in just a second. As you may recall, if you heard the interview with Matan just a little while ago, he since went to Harvard, and like all good Harvard graduate students, ended up suing the university and then came back.And now he's working with a group of other people to found this new Israeli political party called El Hadegel to the flag. But when Matan and I were talking, he mentioned with great praise, Ariel Wiezel, who's taken over for him at the head of the Desert Stars. And he mentioned that Desert Stars has actually got a new campus that's about to open about 10 minutes from where we're seated here in the Negev. And he suggested heartily that I reach out to Ariel and hear the story of Desert Stars as it has changed in the years since Matan was here. We're going to hear from Ariel today. Ariel, first of all, thanks for inviting us down here. Us is my wife came with me because she didn't want me driving all this way by myself.Thank you for coming.Tell us a little bit about yourself first before we get to talk about Kochabei HaMidbar.Great. So thank you. I'm Ariel Wiezel. I'm 45 years old. I'm born and raised in a small kibbutz. Back then in the '80s, in the '90s, to born and raised in kibbutz means that you know only the people that I'm born with, 10 people in my age, and that's it.How big is the kibbutz?It was the Nativ Halamed Hey. Kibbutz in the Ela Valley.How big was the kibbutz then?It was really small. It's like 300 people, and that's it.Where'd you go to school? Where's the high school there?The high school was one hour from there in a bigger kibbutz called Givat Brener, which all the kibbutz then, back then went to that high school. Things, of course, changed from that. But this is how I'm born and raised. Then I went to the army and I serve in a small unit in the Air Force. I think I met until I was 24, 25 when I finished my military service, I met only people that looked like me in the kibbutz and also in the military and everyone looks like me and talking like me. I think the first time that I met something else was when I was 24 or 25 and started to volunteer in another NGO called Acharai, Follow Me, which worked then in youth to prepare them to military service.What youth was that?Exactly. It was from everywhere.Jews and non-Jews? Jews and Arabs?Yeah, Jews and Arabs. I worked, especially with Jews back then, but a youth with a bad and difficult background, and I started to do it in Bat Yam, not from Tel Aviv. Then I think I met for the first time, something else, that looking different than me, wearing clothes that are different, and talking different, and everything was different. Then I started my private journey in the Israeli society. I've been 10 years in that NGO, in several jobs. In the final job there, I was the VP, the Vice President of the Education Program for five years. Then I met everything. I met Haredim, and I met Secular, I met the Arabs, and I met Bedouin, and Jews and everyone, and in the Israeli society. It was my private journey to meet the Israeli society.Were there Russians and Ethiopians there, too?Yeah. I'm running a specific project of the Ethiopian all over the country. It was really interesting for me. Then it was also the first time that I met and started to know the Arabic society from inside. Then I'm running a few projects, and I arrived Desert Stars seven years ago from now. In the I met Matan and he told me, Come. I think from all over the thing that I saw in the Israeli society, in the education field, in the NGOs field, I think back then, seven years ago, I think in the Negev, it was the bigger challenge that I ever met.The Bedouins and the Negev.The Bedouin society, the Negev, the situation here, the feeling part of Israel, the angry, not much hope for the future. I think this is what makes me to understand that I I want to be here for a few years and to try to make things go better. Desert stars, the main issue, what you said before, Daniel, about Matan, he established a desert star together with Dr. Muhammad Al-Nabari. For the first time, it was Jew and Bedouin that running together. They understand and the establishment of Desert stars, I think the main issue was to understand that there are many problems and there are many questions about what the country did in the several years in the Bedouin society in the Negev, did they enough Didn't enough, or did the wrong thing. But I think main question was that there is not enough leadership from inside. Youth Bedouins, men and women that's supposed to take responsibility, and they take responsibility about themselves, about all the life, different fields, and to change the reality, and of course, to feel part of that place. This is, I think, was the main issue. This is the main goal of Desert Start. We want to make them to be leadership inside their community, inside the Bedouin community, and after that, the Negev, and after that, the whole Israeli society.Before we go on, just give us, our listeners, some background about the situation of Bedouins in Israel in general. Where are they located? Obviously in the south and in the north. Then let's talk briefly. We don't have to go into a lot, but you know it infinite amounts. But just what is this whole recognized, unrecognized village thing? What's the implications of that for how young people grow up? Just so our listeners understand where these Bedouin young people are coming from.It's really a good question because one of the main issue of Bedouin, a few of the many This decade was the situation of the living of the non-recognized villages. I would say that there are 300,000 Bedouins in the south. In the negative, we're talking only about the south. In the north, in the center of Israel, it's a different story. We leave it outside. We're talking only in the Negev. There are 300,000 Bedouins here. In the beginning, established over Israel, in 1948, it was after the war, it was here, only 10,000.It's 30 times as much.Exactly. This is one fact. The other fact is that besides seven, Israel established around the late '60s and the early '70s, established seven big villages, big cities. Raat is the biggest. Rahat, now we have more than 80,000 people that live there. Also, beside Raat, there are six more: Lakya, Hura, Ar'arat (an-Naqab), Kuseife and Segev Shalon (Shaqib Al-Salam), those are the main villages.The government had hoped that they would build these cities, which look a lot like any old modern Israeli city, and that they hoped that the Bedouins would gradually leave their encampments from all around and move into the cities. That was the idea.That was the idea. I will say also that what Israel did did after '48 was to make the, they call it the siege area. It's like a triangle from Beer Sheva to Dimona to Arad. Actually, most of the villages, most of the settlement of the Bedouins went inside to that area.But that experiment didn't really work, right? It failed in a lot of ways. Explain to us what the Bedouins resisted about that experiment. Israel either did or did not do it out of the best of intentions. I have no idea. But why did the Bedouins so resist it?So now, out of that number, 300,000, we have a little bit more than 100,000 that living in non-recognized villages. It could be a small village of 300 people. It could be a big one of 4,000 people. Which lived in more than 40 non-recognized villages.What does that mean if you're in an unrecognized village in terms of the reality of your life?Okay. The larger number of the 40 and something villages don't get nothing from the government. They don't get electricity, don't get water, don't get roads, nothing. People there, youth there, and the children there, they're living without nothing.Do they go to school?They have schools.That are run by the Bedouins or by the Israelis?By the Israeli, the Ministry of Education. But it's, Then you can live in an unrecognized village and your closer school could be 15 km for there. You don't have a road.Right, and there's no busses coming there.Exactly, no busses. If there is rain, for example, so they cannot go out. That's the main issue.I just want to compare it to your situation. Your high school was an hour away from where you grew up, but obviously, if it rained, you could still go to school. There were roads, there were busses, there was transportation.Exactly. I have a bus for one hour.These people live the same distance. They're just not going to school.Exactly. I want to I say that during the years, especially the last 20 years, the government of Israel tried to solve it in many different solutions to give the people that want to take care of the ground a little bit part of the money, part of the ground, but it's never go to final agreement. Until now, when we're talking now in July 25, the main issue that bother most of the youth Bedouin in the Negev, it's not the war, it's not Iran, it's not the Hamas, it's not the It's the situation of the non-recognized villages. A lot of people, more than 100,000 people that they don't have nothing. They don't have shelters when they heard the sirens.They've gotten killed.Exactly. This is the main issue. I'm pretty sure, personally, that if, and you can blame the government, and also you can blame the Bedouin themselves. Again, we're going back to the less of a leadership. The people that take responsibility and say, Okay, we want to solve it. If there are enough people also in the Bedouin side, also in the government, there are political issues, of course, and they're almost only when in the early 2000, when Benny Bergen was on it, he almost solved it, and then the government fell down. I mean, always political issue is that they don't get the agreement, but it's really main issue. In our position of Desert Stars, when we are talking about leadership inside the Bedouin society, we're talking about multi-tribe because we want our guys, our stars, we want them to be leadership in all the Bedouin society, not just my village or my tribe.But we have to explain the Hamulot thing. Hamulot are the tribes, and it sounds obvious to you, but I think our listeners would be interested in knowing. I think you said before you did this program when you were 24, Acharai, You'd never met anybody who wasn't like you. But I think it's the case, correct me if I'm wrong, that when a lot of these kids come to Desert Stars, they've never met any other Bedouins who are not part of their tribe. Is that right?That's right, exactly. When we are talking about leadership of inside the Bedouin society, we're talking, of course, about relationship to knowing the Jewish people in the Negev in Israel. Of course, we're talking about the main issue of the multi-tribe inside the Bedouin society.How many tribes are there?There are more than 200. It's different how you count it.And they marry inside their tribe?Some of them, yes. During the last decade, they married. Much more. It's really different about how they live, what they believe in, how they're talking, how they're looking. Even their language is a little bit different. If I am Bedouin, and raised in Lakyia, for example, which is a medium village here.And it's a recognized city.And I meet people like me that are born and raised in Rahat, which is the biggest city. They look much different than me. It's different tribe, different family. And it's much more larger when I meet someone that's born and raised in an unrecognized village, far from the center, far from Beer Sheva.So their religious life is different?Exactly. Much more traditional, much more religion.How does the role of, let's say, teenage girls, what's their life like, let's say, in Rahat, which is a big, recognized, but Bedouin city, versus, I don't know, either an unrecognized village or a much smaller town? Are they closer to the way teenage girls are, let's say, in Tel Aviv, or are they closer to the way the teenage girls are in some of these unrecognized villages? How modern has a place like Rahat? Well, Rahat is modern. When you're looking in Rahat and you are going around, so it's still it doesn't look, it's far from a Beer Sheva, it's far from Omer, and definitely Tel Aviv because it's still also in Rahat, which is the biggest city here in the Negev, there's still a lack of everything. Just only the last few years started to build their public buildings of culture and the big stadium and things like that. Still, Rat is the modern city. When you see, for your question, if you see a young woman that walking there and born and raised there, so she's looking much more modern than youth that are born and raised in the non-recognized, especially because of, like I said before, because of the traditional, because of the religious.Are they going to the university, young women from Rahat? They go to, let's say, Ben Gurion University?Yes. Let's say that it's around 10% of the youth that finish high school in the Negev, 10% going to the university.So 10% of those who finish high school go to university, and what percent of them finish high school?Exactly. It's a little bit less than 50% finish high school, and then only 10% go to Israeli Academies.So 5% of the Bedouin end up going to university.Yeah, let's say 5% to 8%. Even though If I take in that 8% or 10% that going to university or to academic studies, almost half of them, almost 50% of them are dropped out in the first year because it's difficult. Most of them don't speak Hebrew, don't speak English, don't know how to manage themselves. They don't know what they can go to academic and to study. They don't prepare themselves enough.Do their parents want them to go to university or their parents prefer that they stay home and work? Because you hear, if you live where I live, you hear, I don't know if it's true, but the rumor on the street is, especially the parents of boys, want the boys to stay home and work in whatever business the family has. It's fine for the girl if she wants to go to the university, that's fine, but they want the boys to stay home. That's what we hear. Is that true?Yes. So I can say that it's different. I think that now parents understand that this is the most normal way to get the children in the future and to get the future tools and the skills for the future. Most of the Bedouin students that are going to the academic are girls, are women.What percent?Almost 80%.80% of those are more women.And again, because of what you said, because I think things are different. Parents understand this is the only way for women to go out and to get the skills and to get a career in the future.Now, those young women live at home, right? They don't stay over in Beer Sheva.Yes, most of them live at home. Most of them will get married really early, at 20, 21, 22. The girls themselves, they really want to get the academic degree before that.They can start at 18 because they're not going to the army.Exactly. It's another problem because when I started at university, I was 24. After a military service, after I went around, most the Arabs here in the Bedouin, they start university at 19. They're really young. Then they come to the academic and they meet the Jewish student beside them. It's really big gap. That's why they have a lot of obstacles and a challenge to get the degree.Okay, now We can talk about Desert Stars. We've given everybody the background, a little bit of a sociological introduction to the Bedouin. Desert Stars, who are the people? What age are they? What are you trying to accomplish? How many are there? Tell us the whole story of the story. Okay. Like I said before, Desert Stars established, the main goal was to make here people, men and women, to get skills and responsibility to their self and to be leaders, to be a leadership in every field in their life. Of course, education, academic, media. We want them to be skilled and to take responsibility of the living in the Negev for the Bedouin society. This is the main issue. We have a lot of education programs in the Desert Stars. We have high school, which where we're sitting now, next to Kibbutz Lahav. The high school is here. This is the seventh year that we are here.You have what? Three classes that graduated?It's the seven graduates, seven cohorts.Seventh cohort, okay. How many are in each year? How many are in each cohort?We have it now for four grade, we have 220 students.In all four years or for each year?In all four years, 220 students, boys and girls from all over the Negev. They come from here every day, come and go. Part of them, they come from those non-recognized village because we want them to come from all over the Negev.Do you go get them? How did they get here?Yeah, in the first years, it was really reaching out to go and get them. Now, we have more demand and we can have the room here. The main issue here in high school, it's really a special high school. We're working like youth village, which means besides the high school, the pedagogic program and the bagrut and everything.Bagrut is the SIT It's ACT's region's exam, just so people know what that is.We have 20% of that, which is amazing because they're coming here in nine grade with a lot of gaps and they don't know,So 20% get a bagrut? Or what Percent? 90%.90% get a bagrut? That's unbelievable. That's higher than in most Israeli Jewish cities.It's amazing. It's really amazing. We're really proud. Also, it's real. It's not like someone helped them. It's real.Everybody knows that Israeli story. Now, they're 50/50, boys, girls, men, women?Yeah.And they're here for four years.Yes. Here for four years. What I want to say that the unique thing of high school is that we want to establish a youth village. We want them to live in a campus for amazing and the most education way that we can give them. We established here, besides the pedagogic lessons and bagrut and everything,In Hebrew or Arabic, the classes?Arabic. But it's under the Ministry of Education. I mean, like a normal Arabic School.But when they finish, can they speak Hebrew?Yes, that's what I want to say. We have, besides the normal pedagogic lessons, we have here a lot of programs from the informal education, which the main issue that the counselor of that are a graduate of Desert Stars, which come back and they're doing here a lot of activities, and they meet here Jewish. We have a volunteers of of people doing national service. Before the military service that come and live here and they join everything. So young Bedouin that come here from anywhere here in the Negev, he meets another Bedouin from another tribe, another village, which he never met before. I mean, if I were born and raised in one village, I met, until I will be 20, the same tribe, the same family.In my high school, in my kindergarten, the teachers, the guard, everyone's the same family. Here in our small place, we want them to meet another Bedouin from Rahat, from Lakyia. This is one. The other thing, they meet the Jewish and the Israeli society. All the teachers, all the crew is together. We are working here Bedouin and Jewish. Like I said before, like Matan and Dr. Muhammad Al- Nabari established together Jewish and Bedouin. This is the main issue, to go together. We're talking about the multi-tribe. We're talking about formal and informal education to talking about we need to understand another background that most youth Bedouin in the villages, they don't have nothing about informal education. They don't have a youth movement. They don't have matnas. They don't have hugim, they don't have after-school. They almost don't have nothing.So what do they get here, for example?So they get here everything. They get here youth movement. They get here a lot of after-school in many different fields. I mean, they get here space and Hebrew and sports and soccer and volleyball for boys and girls. They get here even a surf. We take them to the sea to learn how to surf.It's probably the first time they ever saw the sea, right?Exactly. Part of them, And debate and English and Hebrew. They got here, everything just need to choose and to be serious. It's not easy to be here a student. But the main issue is to give them because they came here with a lot of gaps, we want to understand them to get the most professional education experience, and we want them to be a leadership. So this is the high school. Like you said before, we just built now a new campus for the high school. Then next September, September 25, we're going to open our new campus, Jusidman campus. It's going to be not far from here, 10 minutes next to Beit Kama. Then we're going to increase our high school from seven grades, and it will be 600 students, not just 200. Again, boys and girls from all over the area.So the reason it's 200 now is because you don't have any more space.We don't have space.There's just a lot of demand, though. Just to give credit where credit is due, because I think it's always, as we say in Hebrew, to recognize the good things that people have done. Just say a couple sentences about why it's called the Jusidman campus and who this family So Jusidman family are Jewish-Mexican, and they are with Desert Start from the day one.They are in our board, and they understand. They're doing a lot of amazing and good things.There's an amazing philanthropic family.Yeah, and they understand togetherness with our board that they want to lead the leadership in the Bedouin Society. From understanding, as I said before, this is the main issue here in the Negev. They are the main philanthrope for the campus. The campus will be a youth village with a dormitory.They're going to sleep over some of them?They're going to sleep there. 300 students from the 600 will sleep there.Girls and boys?In the beginning, it will be boys. I really hope it will be also relevant for girls. I really hope. And Jusidman with us, he understand really early. Before I was here, he saw the vision, and he understand that we need to build here a leadership lighthouse for the Bedouin society. Without the Jusidmans, it is never built. Also the Ministry of Education with us. We have a lot of partners. But they are the main issue of that thing. Next year, we're going to open there since the grade of seven. And later on, we started and build a dormitory because we wanted to be the first youth village in the Arab society in Israel, especially for the Bedouin society and for leadership in the Negev. This is the main issue.That's amazing. So this is the high school program.Exactly. This is the first stage of our theory of change. The next stage are the Gap year. We have two programs for youth that finish high school, not only Desert Stars High School, but also high school of the Bedouin society all over the Negev. We get them for one year. For the boys, it's dormitory already. They sleep like Mechina.There's pre-army Gap year programs called Mechina.But our main goal there, it's, again, to prepare them for academic, prepare them for leadership, for skills, for feeling themselves like they have the skills and the opportunity to change things from inside. They're learning a lot about how to build project, how to change things from inside. They learn here everything. They meet, again, they met all the Israeli different groups in Israel. They're going to the north, they're going to Jerusalem, they're going to Yafo and Lod and everything. They had a lot of, for the Boys Gap year, we have a lot of activities outside, training them outside. They started the gap here in one month in a row outside in the field, and they're going by foot from the Golan, from the Hermon, till here to the Negev.They walk all the way from the Golan to the Negev?Yeah, for one month, and they meet a lot of people in the way and learn about themselves, about how to, we believe that if we want them to be leaders and to be able to change things, they need to know, to believe about themselves. They need to get the skills and the opportunity to change things. The field is the best way.How many people are in that program each year?It's 40 each year, 40 boys and 40 girls. For the girls, it's really the same goal, the same purpose, but without the dormitory because of the tradition.So they don't walk from the camp.Exactly. They walk a little bit less, but they're going outside in the meet and they're doing amazing. They're amazing. The girls are amazing because they understand, like I said before, this is the way for them to go out and to change things. We have also more demand than we can get for those two programs. After that, all of those, they got to our alumni program, which we helped them to continue themselves to the academic. If we said before, about 8% of the general situation of the Bedouin in the academic, so in this study, it's almost 80. It's 10 times more because we believe that they understand this is part of it. If they want to be leader, they have to go through the academic. Almost 80% of them, boys and girls, go to the academic and finish their degree. Then we continue with them to the next level, which means academic, which means career center, and we want them to be a leadership.You're working with placement and all that stuff.Exactly. We want them. Now, the most graduate that we have, they are 27, 28 years old. They're not yet mayors and they're not yet a principle of schools, but they are on the way. We want them to be there. This is the main issue. I can say another thing that there's a start in the last three years. We understand that we want to scaling and to get the door of bigger because we want, like a pyramid, we want them more and more to go and to be leaders. So beside our high school, that's going to be much more bigger. We're working again. We're running a few program in the villages outside. So we have Fawsan. Fawsan means like night, night of the desert, which means like a small youth movement. Our graduates, they're going to the neighborhoods around here, and they started to work with the youth, with the children, and they're talking about the values of about the start and about changing things and about taking responsibility. It's like a youth movement, really. We have a lot of programs that going outside because we want the scaling to be much more bigger because to get into that change role, much more people.It's really fascinating. I have a bunch of questions because it's so interesting. Let's talk about the religious leadership in the Bedouin villages. Very often, higher education for young people raises questions for them as to whether or not the religious establishment that they grew up in is the one they want to live their lives in. And you see it in the Haredi world that they're very nervous about the young Haredi going off to university. You see it in classic Christian societies across the world that the local religious leadership has very mixed feelings. How is the religious leadership in the Bedouin villages, recognized and unrecognized, responded to you and your program? Do they see it as a huge step forward, or are they nervous that they're going to lose their hold over these young people?I think all the Bedouin society are in a, period of transformation, because I think the young generation is really different. You understand that things change. All of them have, it doesn't matter if he lives in a non-recognized village, he have their smartphone, so he knows everything. And besides that, I think the generation of the old people, and especially the religious, are in a change. So they understand that things change not because of Desert Stars, because of the world, because of the reality. I think Desert Stars, what we try to get them, and I think most of the leadership inside the Bedouin society understand now that we want them to change because we want the good future for them and for the community itself. We want them to take responsibility. We want them to take the Bedouin society up in every field. We want them to be much more in relation with the Israeli society itself because we want them to feel part of it. In the beginning of Desert Start, there were a lot of questions about what we try to do. The Jewish come to the Negev, and what about the values of the traditional? I can say as a CEO here, that all the crew here, most of it is Bedouin, but we are working together, Jewish and Bedouin together. All of our decisions inside Desert Start will be always from the from the glass of the Bedouin society and for the Bedouin tradition and for the Bedouin and the Islam values. That's what we always will do. For example, if we are talking of leadership of women, we understand all of us is part of it, but we never will do it exactly the same like the leadership of the men. For example, the two gaps are a little bit different because for the women, it have to be traditional and much more careful. This is what we try to do. But I can say, generally, that people in the Bedouin society and also the older generation understand it's part of it. It's part of the change, and we just help them.So there's not a lot of resistance from the religious leadership in the Bedouin communities.No, I can say also that all of the Bedouins are talking and they have the connection with the religion, with the Islam. Part of them are much more religion than the other, but all of them are, it's really traditional community, so we cannot, and we don't want to to walk beside talking and feeling. All the education programs are in the tradition. We have our people from the traditional value that they are putting the values inside. They are writing the program. We don't invite them. Nothing. Also here, you can see the education model of the Desert Stars. You can see in the middle, respect of the Islam values. It's part of it. We don't want to change nothing. We don't want to raise nothing. Part of our model, of the education model is traditional, is leadership with the religious. It's not split, opposite.The other question that I have, or another question that I have, has to do with how they respond internally, as we say in Hebrew, when they put their head on their pillow at the end of the day and they're thinking for a few minutes before they fall asleep. There's this category when you talk a lot about sociological change that people talk about, at least in the States a lot, called relative deprivation, meaning I didn't feel poor until I met the people who aren't poor. Then all of a sudden, I felt poor. I could see two different ways. Again, I can't get in their head. You can much better, and I want to hear what you have to say. But I could see a young Bedouin person This is my village. This is my family. This is my Hamula. It's life. It's good. I have my smartphone. I have my family. I'm happy. I could see one response is I get to Desert Stars, and all of a sudden, there's a whole Israeli world out there, and these people want to help me enter it. I feel even more welcomed, even more embraced. This is a whole huge opportunity. Or I could say, what? I've been excluded from all of this my whole life, and I feel actually more resentful than I did before I saw that it was there. Do you have both of those things?I think it's both. I think that part of them, I'll just say you cannot say them. We cannot include all the Bedouins. There are 300,000. It's many different interest and opinions. But I think there are two different opinion, exactly what you say. Part of their opinion will say, We are okay, leave us alone. We want to live our life. I think, but it's less and less during last year. And I think, again, the modernization process and people that go outside, let's say that they're going to Beer Sheva to do shopping. So they see everything. They know how people live.They were doing that already anyway, right? Yeah. So there is already coexistent. There is share society in the Negev. So people know. So I think then, and this is what we try to get them in their mind. One, you are a citizen of Israel, you're equal. You need to get your rights and of course, your duties, but you are equal. This is the first thing. And I think much more of our stars think about it. They want to get their rights and they want to be equally civilian. I think, again, that it's another complicated that we need to talk about. It's the relationship with the main Israeli society, let's say. Again, especially our younger staff, they understand and I think they really want to be part of it and they see the future here and they want to be a part of the Israeli society. It's not a question about that. The question is how to do it and how the Israel states get them. This is the main issue, I think, especially the last three or four years, everything that happened during May '21, Shomer Homot in all the cities in the Israeli especially.Just to reminder everybody. It was a war that we had with Hamas back in '21, but there was also a lot of Jewish-Arab violence inside some Israeli cities, especially mixed cities.Exactly. In the mixed cities, also in the Negev. So after that, in the Corona years, so again, when they are bad and the obstacle in children, so they feel it. They feel they don't have nothing here. And of course, the last two, almost two years after October 7th, we can talk about it specific, but I think they feel that definitely, I believe it. They definitely want to feel part and to be part of that place, but they need to feel that the Israeli state see them equally. That's not always the situation. This is the main issue that we say before about the non-recognized. Without talking I'm not talking about who is right and who is wrong. It's different opinions, but Israel State could finish that issue. Yeah, for a long time ago, and it doesn't happen. People that are born and raised here, 10 years old, you see his village destroyed. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, but this is what he sees. You guys bring MKs? You bring members of Knesset here to see what's going on?Yeah.Does it change their view about what the Knesset should do?I want to say yes. It's always not enough. But I think that people, like you said before, most of the people, my friends in the middle of Israel that are liberal and know everything, when they heard about Bedouin society, they have a lot of stereotype from the news, from the media. When people, it doesn't matter who, come to the Negev and meet our stars and meet our people that can speak Hebrew, can't talk about what I just say about the narrative of the Bedouin, how I'm born in ways, I want to be part, I want to be equal, everything is changed. Most of the Israeli mainstream don't know it. We try to do it. After the seventh of October, one of the important things that we understand that part of our job, it's not just that leadership, this is the main issue, but another issue is to make that bridge from the Israeli mainstream to the Negev, and to meet the Bedouin society, to meet the stories, to understand that they're part of it. In the seventh of October, as you know, there are a lot of injured and killed here and got kidnapped. So just so people understand the background, there were a lot of Bedouins who were working in the kibbutzim.They were either killed and some were kidnapped.Exactly. And still kidnapped. And, of course, they got killed.So they feel like, did this make them, in some strange, crazy way, feel more part of Israeli society?I think in the first month of the war, yeah, definitely, yeah. But I think after that, really fast, it come back to be again, like fighting. We need to understand that most of the Bedouin here in the Negev, almost 70% of the families in the Negev, they have relatives in Gaza. Relatives, cousins. So if people are talking about, all the Gaza are criminal, all the Gaza are Hamas. People here in the Negev, people here, people that I work with, what they can do about it when you're talking about, Let's finish Gaza. I have family there. So it's really complicated. I can say personally that also for us in the share crew in Desert Stars, it was really a challenge and really a different month in the beginning of the war because all the Jewish, including me, we went to the military service. I did almost 200 military service days, and I wasn't here. I finished my shift there. I came back to running the organization. The Bedouins, like I said before, in part of it, they're feeling part of that disaster. But Everyone blame them because there are Arabs.So you've just come back from war and you're fighting people in Gaza, and people in Gaza are their family, and then you're here at the school trying to help them. It's really complicated.I think we did two things that help us to understand this is the only way, I think, to continue and to be good in what we try to do. The first thing was to continue. We never stopped our program activities. We continue whatever we could able in the high school, in the pedagogy programs, in the gap year is that they understand that they have to continue. They did everything. A lot of volunteers inside the Bedouin and the Israeli society here inside the Negev. So we continue. We never stopped. And the other thing we did was to talk about the complicated, like you just said, I did Zoom in the seventh of October in the evening for all the management here in the organization, Jewish and Arabs. And also already in the Zoom, I have there one that he's from one of the kibbutzim from the envelope and one from the Sderot, and part of them was on uniform already and the way to the military.The Bedouin colleagues was, again, in the Mamad, in the Miklat, talking about a disaster. We were together in this. We're talking about the complicated situation about Gaza, about the reality, about how we continue, about hope. We did it many times during those months. This was the only way that helped us to understand that we are together. We are together in that. We have to talk about the future. It's not easy.I'm sure it's not easy.But this is the only way.I'm going to ask you one last question. When I drove in this morning, you drive off the highway and you come up the little road, and then you said that there's a kibbutz right across the fence. There's a big Israeli flag when you drive in. And as I drove in, I asked myself, I wonder what these Bedouin kids feel, as you say in Yiddish, their kishkas, their bus or their car or their bicycle or whatever they come in on, they go by that flag. What would you say is their reaction to that flag at the beginning of ninth grade? And what would you think the reaction to that flag is towards the end of 12th grade?Good question. I can say that I don't need to imagine because we measure it. We measure ourselves in all our programs. We measure every year the big and the complicated questions about themselves, about about their hope, about their feeling, about the Bedouin society, about the Israeli society we ask. We have the results. I can say that it's not always easy, especially those last two, almost two years, about that situation. But I think I will give you an example. That kibbutz that we're just talking about, it's kibbutz Lahav. Our high school, we have the same fence of the kibbutz Lahav. In normal year of activity, three times a week, our students from our high school here, they cross the road, cross the fence, and go inside the kibbutz for the sport court. All the sport activities, all the sport lessons are inside the kibbutz. Kibbutz Lahav told us in the beginning, please come in. And we continue already since the seventh of October, we continue, we never stopped. What I want to say that the students here, they understand it's much higher than just talking about Jewish and Arabs and about, let's see. We need and we have to see different the narrative.There are different stories here, from the history until now. But the future is togetherness. There are no question. I think that when they see the flag, most of them doesn't feel comfortable because what I said before, because of the challenges, because of what they hear about the police and about the non-recognized and about the government and about things that doesn't go, it's never simple. But when they meet me and when they meet our Jewish volunteers that live here and speak with them in the beginning with their hands, and then they learn a little bit Arabic, they know Hebrew, this is the main issue. So all the students that finish here high school, they know Hebrew, they know me, they know my Jewish volunteers, they know their colleagues from the other tribe families, Bedouins. And I think this is the main issue. They can look into the future. They have hope. We ask them specific about hope. They have hope that the future will be much better for them. They want to go to academic, to Israel academic, and not to go abroad to learn here, to study here. They want to come back to their villages to change things. Their villages next to Kibbutz Lahav, next to Beer Sheva, next to Omer, we are here, togetherness. I think this is the main issue. It's never easy, but this is the only way, talking about the complicated and to walking together. This is what we try to do.It's the hope that we all need. I think this is a period of Israeli history when hope is a resource that's hard to come by. I keep thinking as I'm listening to you, somebody should do this for different Jewish groups within Israeli society. Somebody should do this for Haredim, somebody should do this for some groups of Ethiopians who have not yet made their way in. It's really, as you said, we have different narratives, we have different stories, and talking about the complexities and talking about it is the only way we're going to build a future together. Exactly. To hear what you've accomplished and to see that you're about to move into a new campus, it's really an extraordinary accomplishment. So thank you for taking the time and telling us about a part of the Israeli story that we really don't hear about nearly often enough. And wish you and all of your colleagues continued success in what's really critically important work for Israel.Thank you very much, Daniel. Thank you for the opportunity. And I invite you all the listeners to come and visit us in our new campus in the Negev and to see leadership in Bedouin society and education. And please come.Well, we'll put information how they can get in touch, and hopefully people will follow up. Ariel Weizel, thank you so much once again.Thank you very much.

I got home late from the office last night, shortly after 8:30, so the evening news was almost done. But I was tired and figured that rather than do something that required focus, I’d watch whatever was left. I popped something in the microwave and turned on Channel 12.

They were wrapping up a report about how the hunger tragedy in Gaza is being portrayed by news outlets around the world—US, Canada, France, England (you can hear a bit of French at the end of the clip before the Hebrew starts). And then, as the report ended, Yonit Levi, the Channel 12 anchor for that program (she is the first woman to anchor a major news program in Israel) said what she said in the clip above.

I was stunned that an anchor would say that, so clearly and without hesitancy. “Something big is clearly changing,” I noted to myself, and kind of wished that somehow I’d recorded those few seconds. But I hadn’t.

This morning, though, that few-seconds-long remark was all over Israeli social media, including here. The post was by Einat Schiff, the TV and music critic for Yediot Achronot. She posted the video of Yonit Levi, and in the process also noted what I’d felt—that this was a very changed tone for Israeli TV.

Here’s the translation of Schiff’s remark:

An unusual moment on Channel 12 News: Yonit Levi says about the images from Gaza, “It’s time to understand that this is not a failure of public diplomacy, but a moral failure.” Maybe she knows of an influential and widely watched broadcast that could help on this issue.

Yes, a bit of snark. But also gratitude on Schiff’s part to Yonit Levi for calling it like she sees it.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Yonit Levi and Einav Schiff may have led the charge on TV (or posting about what had been said on TV), but they were hardly alone in the Israeli Hebrew press, which is changing its tune on the Gaza hunger calamity with astonishing rapidity.

Avi Yissacharoff, the well respected journalist and co-creator of Fauda, pulled no punches in his regular YNet column (AI-generated translation below):

This is No Longer Just Gross Incompetence – This is a Colossal Policy Failure

Everyone knew, everyone warned: We must create new realities in Gaza in order to translate the military and tactical achievements into different political realities. Everyone understood this—except for Netanyahu and his cabinet. Now, everyone is paying the price.

Almost everything has been said and written about the intelligence and military failure, the IDF’s and the government’s failure on October 7. But it turns out that the disaster did not end there—it merely began, and has grown, month after month, mainly in the humanitarian disasters. What is happening now in Gaza is worse than ever.

Even our friends around the world are no longer willing to see the images coming out of Gaza, which now manage to unite the entire world against us.

Seasoned Israeli writers, including the former Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Post (and frequent guest on our podcast) Yaakov Katz joined the pile-on in accusing the government of having no plan and thus having brought this disaster on ourselves:

Katz was referring to a previous post by Smotrich which, as Katz suggests, seemed silly then and now looks positively moronic:

Here’s the text:

Remember these images and this day (the beginning of the distribution of aid in Gaza through the American company that provides services to civilians and in a way that does not allow Hamas to control the aid).

This is a turning point in the war that will bring Israel victory and the destruction of Hamas. Better late than never.

Smotrich understands that the political tide is turning against him. With the Haredim in revolt, Israel now despised internationally to a degree that has never, ever been the case before, a war we cannot figure out how to win and a trial he cannot get to end, Netanyahu is up to his ears in trouble and has lost patience with him. Indeed, Smotrich was excluded from high level meetings about the increased humanitarian aid, because the PM didn’t want to deal with his predictable tantrum when it was so obvious that Israel had no choice that even the PM was caving in.

As predicted, Smotrich threatened to resign. And then, not surprisingly, recognizing that his political capital has dwindled to almost nothing (polls show him not making it into the Knesset next time), he just whimpered and limped off with his tail between his legs.

To save face, he’s now claiming that he’s not objecting to the humanitarian aid because it’s the prelude to the IDF’s new offensive in Gaza. His powers of imagination are impressive.

Finally, on this topic, I wanted to link to what I thought was a beautifully written piece by my friend and colleague, Gabi Mitchell. We’ve linked to Gabi’s work before and he’s been on our podcast.

When I asked him yesterday after I read his piece how many days he’d served in Gaza during this war, he told me that he’d lost count. But it was hundreds, during which he left his wife and three daughters and like hundreds of thousands of others, went to war for a war he hated but deeply believed in.

Now, like thousands and thousands of others, he, too, has changed. Those readers interested in getting a sense of how much the Israeli mindset has changed over the course of this war would do well to read Gabi’s column from January 2024 here

while comparing it to his column yesterday. Nothing sums up the change better than that.

The new piece is not short, but it is beautiful and deeply honest—it’s the kind of writing we all need to let seep in. I urge you to take the time to read it.

And still …

There are hard days. Most of the tragedy was brought on us by barbarians whom we haven’t yet fully defeated, while some of our predicament we’ve brought on ourselves.

Still, most of the people I know who live here believe that we’ll see this through. It won’t be quick and it won’t be soon. It might not be in our lifetimes. But it will happen. We’ll eventually begin to climb out of the abyss—which might well first get deeper, so long as we are willing to stick it out and keep working …

With that in mind, two recent posts, one from yesterday and one a bit older, uploaded by people who are determined to keep our spirits — and thus hopefully those of our readers, too — high.

And then, Chilli Tropper, a well known public personality in Israel who often posts heartwarming material, posted this last week (AI-generated translation of his post below the screenshot):

Boris was seriously injured in the war. He also lost a leg.Anna came to visit him in the hospital. They fell in love and last night they got married.That too is a victory.Under the chuppah, they were also blessed by the doctor who treated him in the field and the IDF medic who held his fingers on a pressure point [to stop bleeding] for two hours.The people who saved Boris’s life were there to celebrate with him at this emotional moment.And around them stood countless war heroes—wounded, scarred, and amputated—with a great love for life and a daily choice to live.Congratulations, Boris and Anna.

Here’s the brief video he posted … it looks so simple, and it’s so not …

Mazal tov …. and thank you …

The Daf Yomi cycle (in which one studies one page of Talmud a day and finishes the entire corpus in about seven and a half years—we have about two years to go in this round) is currently studying the Tractate of Avodah Zarah, which discusses social and economic relations between Jews and Gentiles. That subject is touched upon in the second of the three questions the residents of Ginzak asked Rabbi Akiva in the selection above, which is why this whole passage appears in this tractate.

This paragraph appeared in one of the pages for last week. The questions are somewhat technical and we won’t address what’s really at stake in each one in this space. But I mention the passage here because when we studied it last week, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “How refreshing. One doesn’t pretend to know what one doesn’t know, and what knows what one doesn’t know.”

Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest Jewish sages of all time, did not know the answer to the questions he was asked. When faced with the questions, though, he did not pretend that he knew. Nor is his not having known the answer presented as some sort of blemish. He was human, and he didn’t know everything. Plain and simple.

Part of his greatness lay in acknowledging what he did not know.

Not knowing is what Israelis are facing when it comes to the question of Gaza and hunger. That there is food insecurity in Gaza is denied by almost no one. Whether Gazans are facing starvation is another question, and who’s responsible for the dire situation is also not clear. To those of us who can do little more than read the news, the answers are frustratingly evasive.

Many Israelis acknowledge that they don’t know, while many others—as is human—are sure that they know, even if they know opposite things.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Nachman Shai is an Israeli public figure widely respected and admired for his intellect and character. He’s had a phenomenally successful career, as both a journalist as well as politician. He has served as Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs, prior to which he served as a member of the Knesset and its Deputy Speaker, as well as the IDF spokesman.

If anyone in Israeli society should have access to the people who can tell him what the “real” story in Gaza is, it would be Nachman Shai.

That is precisely what made his recent Facebook post (Google-translated below) so telling. Nachman Shai appears to acknowledge—he just doesn’t know. (For careful readers who note the date that Google assigns the post, I confess that I don’t know what “Jinland” is. In Hebrew, it reads “July”.)

To give a sense of the multiplicity of views that make up Israeli life, here are just a few of the responses, again Google-translated (the posts are all public, but I’m blurring the names just so we think more about what’s being said than about who said it).

Note that there’s not a lot of discussion as to whether or not there are food shortages. That, among most Israelis, is no longer a contended issue. What’s debated is the reason: Hamas? Egypt? Israel? What’s discussed is the moral issue: let Hamas release the hostages first, and this will all be over; why is Israel falling into Hamas’ trap again? Should this even be Israel’s responsibility? Etc.

While I certainly do not resonate to all the comments above (or many of the others written in response to Nachman Shai’s post), it’s parenthetically worth noting the civility of the discussion. That’s not true everywhere on Israeli social media, and a lot of it in this instance has to do with Nachman Shai’s thoughtful and respectful reputation. But still, this is, at times, still a society that knows how to talk. I’m not sure about listen, but at least talk civilly.

So why is the question of whether there is serious hunger in Gaza no longer much of a question? Interestingly, it’s largely because the mainstream news has recently started focusing on it in ways that it didn’t in the past. Here’s a longer version of the video clip at the top of this post, which comes from Channel 12. It was shared by the group UnXeptable and we added English subtitles.

UnXeptable posted it, I imagine, because it is indicative of a shift in how Israeli news outlets are covering the subject.

Now, the question is, “what’s behind all this?” The main news coming from Gaza today (in addition to the horrifying deaths of two more soldiers) is about the “humanitarian pause” in fighting that the IDF has suddenly imposed. Who insisted on that? Why was it only agreed to now? Is it a long term plan or something to mollify someone?

That there’s something political brewing is obvious, even from the brief notifications that papers like the Jerusalem Post have been sending out today:

The ceasefires are in place, for now, but they’re going to be very, very unpopular with Netanyahu’s right flank, which continues to insist that there must be no lull in the fighting, anyway, not for Gazan civilians and not for hostages, until Hamas is destroyed. So Israeli officials are busy denying that the ceasefires are a “concession” (to whom are they not a concession?) and Netanyahu is equally busy trying to stay off the radar screen.

How long are these humanitarian lulls going to last? How much of a difference will they make?

That depends, probably, on who insisted on them in the first place—and that, like much else about this story, we still do not know.

Our conversation, which you’re welcome to listen to in full, was called "From Zion Shall Go Forth Torah" — but of what sort? You’re invited to listen to it here.

More recently, Rabbi Azari invited me to join him on his podcast for the Daniel Centers for Progressive Judaism, and I gratefully agreed. Our conversation ranged over a wide array of issues pertaining to the mood in Israel, the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Israel’s present government, the “real” reason for the chasm between American Jews and Israelis, and much more.

With the kind permission of the Daniel Centers for Progressive Judaism, we’re sharing that conversation below.

Below the link to the video, we’re adding an invitation for you to please ask questions based on the video, in the COMMENTS section, and we’ll record a session devoted to responses to your questions, too.

As we note below, once you’ve watched the video below, if you do, if you have questions or issues that you think need following up, please enter them into the COMMENTS section (open to everyone in this case) and we’ll set up a video conversation in which we can respond to all this soon. Thanks!

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

If you have questions that you would have liked us to discuss in the video above, please enter them in the COMMENTS section, which today is open to all readers. We’ll try to record a session with responses to those questions in the near future.

Though things can always change as things on the ground unfold, our tentative plans for this week include:

Tuesday: What happens when a teacher in a secular kindergarten in the Tel Aviv area tells the kids that it was God who created reptiles without legs? A bit of a WhatsApp theological and political conversation, that offers a humorous but also interesting insight into the priorities and concerns of secular Israeli parents in their 30’s.

Wednesday: Izhar Armoni, an Israeli venture capitalist, had a unique idea about how to repopulate the south (Gaza envelope) and the north, with the populations that were thinking seriously about not returning. What would it take? Making education and communal life better there than they ever had been before, indeed better than they are in much of the rest of Israel. In this week’s podcast, we hear from Izhar about his project, Habaita/Homeward.

Thursday: The Druze and the Jews. In the tragic story about Syria’s Druze community last week and the response of Israel’s Druze population, there’s an important lesson for Diaspora Jews to learn, as well. This week’s essay will address that often unspoken—and admittedly not terribly politically correct—message.

So later this week, we’ll be sharing the recording of that video, and then affording all our readers a chance to ask questions based on the conversation. We’ll answer those, we hope, in a separate video conversation, to which we’ll once again invite our listeners.

As we often do on Sundays, we begin the week with a quick glimpse at some telling pages from this weekend’s Israeli Hebrew press. Todays, the covers of two of the Magazine Sections of Yedi’ot Ahronot, Israel’s centrist, best-selling Israeli daily.

We begin with the cover of the “Musaf” section, the design of which is rather striking (and clever) and sports the main (white) headline

“Another Week at the Office”

Below that white headline, a litany of issues Netanyahu will have to address this week (and the list is far from complete)—a list that serves as a telling reminder of how virtually everything here is in flux.

Everything is on Netanyahu’s head: The resignation of the Haredi parties. The morass in Syria. The ongoing war and the bloodletting in Gaza. The killing of Gazans at the aid distribution points. Obstacles in the hostage deal. A new front against the Attorney General. The battles surrounding his court case. ◼️ But then the [Knesset’s] summer recess is just around the corner, and after the Holidays, God knows …

And then, the cover of the Real Estate Magazine.

How many real estate sections have you seen that have as their cover photograph a building that’s been destroyed by a ballistic missile?

Only in Israel.

The main point of the front page is a fact that Israelis may not have known before the recent Iran war, but that we now know all too well—about 70% of Israeli homes have no safe room and no shelter in their buildings.

In this new era, in which the threats we face are not 1950’s Fedayeen sneaking across the border, terrorist bombs on buses, Saddam’s poison gas, Hamas’ rockets, Hezbollah’s missiles or drive by shootings in major cities—but rather, ballistic missiles from Iran and Yemen (that’s so far—could there be more to follow?), something about the protection of Israelis’ homes simply has to change. Now.

White and Blue Headline:

“The greater the destruction, the greater the opportunity.”

Smaller headline on the white banner, below the blue:

Tens of thousands of properties across Israel were damaged in the war with Iran, and the results are both worrisome and dangerous. Repairing this extensive damage, which will require massive reconstruction projects, is now dependent on a construction industry that has not yet recovered from October 7.

But from here, there’s nowhere to go but up.

The cooperation of the local authorities, private investment and governmental offices, alongside a national pride that ought not be dismissed, are cause for measured optimism. Now, everyone needs to heed the lessons and to strengthen and protect buildings everywhere—and fast.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Though things can always change as things on the ground unfold, our tentative plans for this week include:

Monday: The video podcast mentioned above (a very brief clip is posted at the top of this page) between Rabbi Meir Azari and me. We’ll be crowdsourcing some questions and responses for us to respond to in due course.

Tuesday: What happens when a teacher in a secular kindergarten in the Tel Aviv area tells the kids that it was God who created reptiles without legs? A bit of a WhatsApp theological and political conversation, that offers a humorous but also interesting insight into the priorities and concerns of secular Israeli parents in their 30’s.

Wednesday: Izhar Armoni, an Israeli venture capitalist, had a unique idea about how to repopulate the south (Gaza envelope) and the north, with the populations that were thinking seriously about not returning. What would it take? Making education and communal life better there than they ever had been before, indeed better than they are in much of the rest of Israel. In this week’s podcast, we hear from Izhar about his project, Habaita/Homeward.

Thursday: The Druze and the Jews. In the tragic story about Syria’s Druze community last week and the response of Israel’s Druze population, there’s an important lesson for Diaspora Jews to learn, as well. This week’s essay will address that often unspoken—and admittedly not terribly politically correct—message.

The moment is hard to pinpoint — for it’s been a gradual process. But the assumption behind the question is true—very few people (at least in our circles) believe very much we’re being told by official channels anymore.

* “There’s progress on the hostage negotiations”? Right, we’ve heard that more than a few times. We’ll believe it when they’re home.

* “Army bases weren’t hit by the Iranian ballistic missiles.” Well, that’s a relief. Oh, oops. It turns out, they were.

* “But none were seriously damaged.” We’ll see how long it takes for that to get revised.

Some of this is politics, just as it would be in any other country. Some of it is the army censor, which both decides what it wants released and is also told by the political echelon what it can release.

But some of what’s happening here is different, and changing. There’s a cynicism, born of exhaustion, that is setting in. Hang around here and sit in enough cafés and restaurants and listen to the tables around you, and you can’t help but hear it and feel it. The whole thing is reminding me more and more of the tidal wave of cynicism that lies at the very core of Robin William’s brilliant performance in the clip (and the movie of which it’s a part) above.

The cynicism hasn’t yet reached the epic proportions that it had in America long before Good Morning Vietnam was produced (in 1987), but those at the helm of this country would be well advised to monitor the cynicism-meter closely and to take it dead-seriously.

For months, even more, we’ve been told that only military pressure will get all the hostages back, but that the army is making steady progress in destroying Hamas and getting us to that point. What sort of military progress is being made is anyone’s guess (the army censors, and all that), but the number of IDF coffins coming back is much less subjective.

So when Israelis read things like this headline on YNet from just this morning, the cynicism bubbling starts again:

The testimony that the political echelon has demanded be censored: “Hamas has not been defeated.”

Testimonies from commanders, conversations with senior officials, and monitoring of data reveal the reality that the IDF has been ordered to censor: it is employing a method of combat that is merely scattering the militants, concern over [IDF] casualties that is leading to slow progress, and complex tunnels that are still being discovered near the border.

It is now clear that the fighting, which was marketed as “Oz VeCherev” (“Valor and Sword”) and “Merkavot Gideon” (“Gideon’s Chariots”), was not planned for 2025—and on the ground, people are saying: “They’re selling the public a false image, even in another five years we’ll still be fighting here.”

We’ll be fighting here in another five years? Perhaps not. But perhaps yes? With what to show for it?

Those are the sorts of questions that remind some of us, of a certain age, of a different war. Hence Robin Williams’ unforgettable scene in the very brief clip above.

Speaking of the military censor. …

All news from the front, including casualties, is strictly controlled by the military censor. Very often our phones will start buzzing with rumors that soldiers were killed, but it will take hours, often until the next day, before anything is officially noted on the news—mostly to keep the enemy in the fog, and to have time to notify families.

Then, we hear the words everyone dreads: hutar le-pirsum. “The censor is now permitting us to report …” You know what’s coming. Somebody is dead. Sometimes many somebodies. The lives of another whole family, or many whole families, were just destroyed.

Moshe Shapiro, whose son Aner was murdered on October 7th after valiantly defending those in his small shelter by tossing grenades out of the shelter (where he and other Nova Festival participants had take refuge) and back at the Hamas murderers who had thrown them in, is among many other gifts also a very talented artist. He posted on his social media page this week a chilling sketch.

As those who live here understand immediately when they see it, it’s quite obviously a drawing of an Israeli military gravestone. They all look exactly the same, all the tens and thens of thousands of them spread across the country.

Typically, they list the name the soldier’s name, rank, date of birth, date of death, his/ her age upon death and (often) in what war s/he was killed, or where. That’s it. Except for the army insignia at the top right.

But not in Shapiro’s caustic, painful post this week:

Here, the tombstone reads, “hutar le-pirsum”: “The censor is now permitting us to report … He didn’t manage to get an exemption from army service.”

The reference to the Haredim is obvious, coming as the drawing does in a week when the Haredi parties left the coalition but have not yet brought down the government. They’re not going to vote with the government, but neither will they (for now) side with the opposition on votes of no confidence. Many of us are praying they take the long threatened hike, though the smart money is that Bibi will do just fine if they force elections.

I told my wife over a quick lunch today about Shapiro’s sketch, and her first words were “Oh, my God.”

Just like in the video clip above.

Then there’s Nir Dvori chiming in with more sobering news. Dvori is the widely admired and trusted military affairs correspondent on Channel 12. This clip was posted by Yaya Fink, a well known content producer and social and political activist, on his Facebook page.

By the way—and this is completely serious—try finding a therapist in Israel these days, especially one trained in trauma work. And then get on line ….

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

And then there is Yaya Fink himself, with a message for Bezalel Smotrich. This clip is actually a few months old, but as the war grinds on and public frustration grows wider and deeper, the clip has enjoyed a bit of a comeback:

No one that I know here believes that the decisions our leadership needs to make are simple. Most people agree—the hostages have to come back. Now. But ask them, “Do you think there’s any way we’ll get them all?” and things get very quiet. Why in the world would Hamas ever do that?

Most people also agree that Hamas cannot be left in charge of Gaza. But after two years, if we haven’t dislodged them, do we really know how? Is it something we can even do? At what cost?

And if we can’t?

With many reservists having done 200, 300 and 400 days duty in this war, rage about the Haredim is about to explode. Will Bibi cave? How will the wider public respond if he does?

Earlier this week, the day 1,000 Israeli Druze crossed the border (in what was an exhibition of an extraordinary sense of obligation and duty to their fellow Druze, a subject about which I’ll post an essay next week), I wrote a friend who’d suggested we get together a few weeks ago — but I’d dropped the ball.

The crossed out name is his son—out of the army but in the reserves—who’s been in Gaza forever, I believe in the West Bank for a while and is now in Syria. This kid has served hundreds and hundreds of days.

I’d love to get a Haredi person across the table to stare this kid in the face and explain how what they’re demanding is just. I’d love to get the Likud MK’s who will invariably crumble and vote for a Haredi-demanded deal and ask them to explain to this kid how they sleep at night.

My friend is right. We do need to keep on laughing (and drinking gin and tonics). Those abroad who instead of drinking gin and tonics are drinking the “Israel’s winning everywhere” Kool-Aid (and we all know who’s sending those emails out) are missing a critical part of what is now the story of what it means to be Israeli.

It’s that part of being Israeli that will define the future of this place.

And it’s that part of being Israeli that desperately needs some rest.

With rest in mind … Shabbat Shalom.

“Nothing to say,” he said to me. “Just a pointless disaster.”

Then he looked at the crowd of young men in the room, and said, “If one of my sons got called up and was to ask me if he should go, I wouldn’t hesitate. For sure I’d tell him not to go. To possibly die for what?”

I looked at my own son, the father of the birthday boy, who was busy chatting with other people. I knew that if he got called up yet again, he’d never ask me what I thought he should do. First, he wouldn’t want to put me in that situation, and more importantly, he’s the kind to make his own decisions.

But would I think he should go?

I think he knows the answer.

The Times of Israel piece below, in which Lazar Berman argues that Bibi has bought himself some time in the US with the Iran “afterglow” is quite likely correct when it comes to the US.

In Israel, though, there’s no “afterglow.”

Even immediately after the war, polls showed that Bibi himself had gotten a bit of a bump (a seat or two in the Knesset, apparently), but that he still wouldn’t be able to form a coalition. With that, all talk of his possibly calling early elections disappeared. Netanyahu is obviously not going to call elections unless he is sure he can win. And it’s far from clear that he could or would.

More reflective of the mood here is the Haaretz headline, which asks not whether the war in Gaza is accomplishing anything (I know many people who are opposed to ending it, but I don’t know any who can tell me what it’s accomplishing), but whether Bibi can end it. Of course, he could end it. But he won’t, if it means his government will fall. And his government will indeed fall, he fears, if Smotrich and Ben Gvir (both of whom are in essence draft dodgers themselves) leave the coalition when he orders the war to stop.

So the war grinds on. Guys keep coming back dead, there’s little to show for all our efforts, yesterday an Air Force mistake killed Gazan children, and on and on. It’s a slog, and Israelis are increasingly just numb. They know that all the protests in the world won’t bring on a government crisis, and that Bibi doesn’t care about protests. He cares about polls.

As the press noted, right before Bibi was supposed to fly to DC last week, he delayed his flight because he had to put out a Haredi-sparked forest fire. They apparently decided that with the whole country focused on the Iran-aftermath, the war in Gaza and Bib’s trip, that would be the perfect moment to push through the bill exempting their sons—permanently this time—from serving in the army.

Bibi did not want the country exploding while he was away, so he delayed the trip so he could whack some moles.

For the time being, it worked. But the issue is brewing again, and one sees it everywhere. When the woman in this video below (a portion of which is posted above) tells Moshe Gafni that she knows he’d bring down the government over the draft law. Gafni looks (as he almost always does in these Knesset hearings ) like he’s just swallowed a mouse. But he knows how to chew. And he knows that that one issue is what keeps him in power.

So the rage continues, as does Gafni’s indifference (and that of all his Haredi colleagues). Here’s an exchange between Inbar Hayman’s mother and Gafni. This is from Channel 99, the Knesset channel:

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Thus, it is not for naught that other politicians (we posted one by Matan Kahana a few days ago) have started posting videos about the issue on their social media outlets. Israeli social media is awash with clips like these.

Here’s Naftali Bennet, reminding Israelis where he stands and making sure that they remember that the Haredim have no intention of giving up.

Bennet and others understand that if this is the issue on which the next elections turn, they have a chance at throwing Bibi out. Bibi, therefore, will do everything he can to make sure that this is not the central issue.

What will it take for that to be the case?

In the face of all this, and in the face of all the loss (the most horrific incident the loss of five soldiers and fourteen wounded last week), there are some voices doing whatever they can to hold things together.

Hagai Luber, an actor, playwright, theater director, acting teacher, and the founder and artistic director of the “Aspaklaria” theater and acting school (who happens to be religious) posts material on his Facebook page that is just beautiful.

He recently posted this, in the aftermath of the horrific military loss in Gaza last week. We’re sharing it here because despite the rage, despite the frustration, this is also an important thread in Israeli discourse these days:

**Supplication** Please, please, On the panels in the TV studios, On social media and in tweets, In the Knesset, in committees, and in speeches. And in the war cabinet, in the heat of discussions, Do not use the dead soldiers as proof of your righteousness! Do not say—"See? We must achieve a decisive victory." And do not say—"This is the proof that it is time to end the war." And do not prove with a victorious shout that if only there were more fighters, the disaster would have been avoided. And do not passionately criticize the methods of fighting and the security doctrine. And do not say—not today at least— That we must... That now... That the time has come... That we warned long ago... (And never, ever dare to say "They fell for politics and in vain") Just take a moment, Or a day, Or a year. And quietly look at these beautiful ones, in the picture. And think about the wondrous fact, That regardless of taking a stand or having an opinion, They were willing to die for you (f.) and for you (m.). And when they heard over the radio that soldiers hit explosives, The rescue forces rushed there to save lives, And took fire and continued, gritting their teeth, in evacuating them. And they didn’t check which sector they belonged to. And whether they are "secular" or "ultra-Orthodox," And what their opinion is about the situation and what exactly they think. And this unconditional connection is the rock of our existence. And it is stronger and more steadfast than all our follies. And it is the secret of our strength. And it is the light and the good in our lives. We will grieve together. We will be comforted together. And we will rise together. Haggai Lober

Imagine if Israel had a leader who said anything like that, even close.

Born and raised in Israel, Dr. Wilf served as an Intelligence Officer in the Israel Defense Forces, Foreign Policy Advisor to Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres and a strategic consultant with McKinsey & Company.

Dr. Wilf has a BA from Harvard, an MBA from INSEAD in France, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Cambridge. She was the Goldman Visiting Professor at Georgetown University.

Dr. Wilf is the author of seven books that explore key issues in Israeli society. “We Should All Be Zionists“, published in 2022, brings together her essays from the past four years on Israel, Zionism and the path to peace; the co-authored “The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace”, was published in 2020.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Dr. Wilf recently delivering the opening lecture of the Asper Center for Zionist Education on June 5th at Shalem College in Jerusalem. We are sharing it with you. Click on the image below to play the video, or here for the YouTube link.

Since most of our readers and listeners could not be present at the lecture in Jerusalem, we’re providing our (paid) subscribers an opportunity to pose questions that they would have liked to ask had they been able to attend.

Einat Wilf has agreed to come back on our podcast, and she’ll address as many of those questions as she can. Please post your questions to the COMMENTS section, not via email (emailed questions cannot be shared with our team).

Later this week, we will post the entire lecture, and since most of our readers and listeners could not be present at the lecture in Jerusalem, we’ll give our (paid) subscribers an opportunity to pose questions that they would have liked to ask had they been able to attend. Einat Wilf has agreed to come back on our podcast, and she’ll address as many of those questions as she can.

Below, a few glimpses at the sort of questions Israelis are going to have to start to ask …

Today, all eyes are on Washington, DC. Netanyahu has already arrived there (Israeli news covered his arrival) but he has not yet (as of this writing) met with President Trump. Is there going to be an end to the Gaza war (which Trump apparently wants, but which Bibi may or may not be willing to agree to because of the potential domestic political costs)? A ceasefire?

How hard will Trump press Bibi? Or, as many are suggesting, is Bibi really hoping Trump will leave him no choice? Might the whole trip be a cover for him to come back and tell his right flank, “Here’s where the President of the United States drew the line. This is no longer up to us.”?

We shall see.

Perhaps the most agonizing dimension of this unknown is the fate of the twenty hostages who are believed to be alive. If the present draft of the agreement with Hamas comes to be, only ten are getting out in this deal (first eight, then two more down the road). The other ten? It’s unbearable to imagine what their families (whichever families they will end up being) must be feeling.

With all this in mind, two of the families allowed the Hostage Family Forum to release clips of their sons in captivity. The clips were shown all over Israeli media, and were referenced by the English media, but mostly without subtitles.

We’ve added subtitles so everyone can understand what it is Israelis were just exposed to. Will it make a difference? Not clear.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Netanyahu’s flight to the US was actually delayed because of a wrench that the Ultra-Orthodox tossed into the politics machine just as he was about to leave. With all eyes on Gaza, they apparently believe that this is the moment that they can get a bill passed that will permanently exempt their sons from serving in the army.

If the bill passes, will the country explode? Quite possibly. (One has to hope that it will.) Does Bibi have an escape hatch? Not clear.

Since it’s all up for grabs, once again, parties are shuffling and leading figures are making statements to the public. Here is one by Matan Kahana, who recently resigned the Knesset along with Gadi Eizenkot.

Why people of all ilks make these videos from their cars has never been clear to me, but so it is. Here’s a video that Kahana just released about the Haredi draft issue, trying to make sure that Yuli Edelstein, who is widely suspected of getting ready to give into them, toes the line.

Kahana is a very impressive guy, having served in elite units both on the ground and in the air. He was a colonel in the IDF, both a combat soldier in the most elite commando unit Sayeret Matkal as well as a fighter pilot. He was also a commander of a squadron of F-16s.

Will Israelis share his disgust (at both the Haredim and Yudelstein)? The answer to that question may determine Bibi’s political future.

I rarely raise matters of religious tradition in these columns, but every now and then, something feels like it’s just begging to be mentioned. A recent page of the daf yomi, the cycle of a daily page of Talmud study (which gets you through the whole thing in about 7 1/2 years), struck me as eerily timely.

Before we get to it …

When I was a kid, my family lived in Israel from 1969-1971. My father, who was an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins (back in the days before anyone knew what an epidemiologist was), was very involved in public health in the Negev.

With some regularity, his work in the Negev caused him to have to go into Gaza. But it was no big deal. On more than one occasion, he actually took me in our car. I don’t remember much of it … it didn’t seem all that different from Arab neighborhoods in Israel (back then), I recall thinking.

Obviously, Israeli fathers no longer take their kids into Gaza (just as Jerusalemites no longer get their cars serviced in Wadi al-Joz or other East Jerusalem neighborhoods as they did when we first moved here, where it’s much cheaper, but no longer so safe).

Last week, we were studying Avodah Zarah, the tractate about Jewish interactions with Gentiles and their religious customs, when we came to this on AZ 11b:

MISHNA: In the case of a city in which there is active idol worship, it is permitted to engage in business transactions with gentiles who live outside of the city. If the idol worship is outside the city, it is permitted to engage in business within the city. What is the halakha with regard to traveling there, a place where a pagan festival is being celebrated? When the road is designated only for that place, it is prohibited to use the road, as onlookers will assume that the traveler intends to join the festival. But if one were able to travel on it to arrive at another place, it is permitted to use the road to reach the place that is observing the festival.

ON THE SURFACE IT SEEMS PRETTY CLEAR, but things are never that simple in the Talmud. So the Talmud asks how far outside the city one of the idolatrous places must be to be considered outside. And the answer is, “just like things are in Gaza.”

And this was almost two thousand years ago …

GEMARA: The Gemara asks: What are the circumstances that determine whether a place is sufficiently far from a city to be considered outside of it? Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish says in the name of Rabbi Ḥanina: A place that is far enough away is, for example, the bazaar [atluza] of Gaza, which is located outside the city walls. And some say that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish asked Rabbi Ḥanina about this issue: What is the halakha with regard to the bazaar of Gaza? May one conduct business there on the day of a festival celebrated in Gaza? Rabbi Ḥanina said to him: Did you never in your lifetime travel to Tyre and see a Jew and a gentile place two pots on one stove, and yet the Sages were not concerned and did not issue a prohibition with regard to the meat that was in the pot belonging to the Jew, despite the fact that forbidden food was in close proximity to the permitted food? Similarly, in this case as well, the Sages were not concerned about the bazaar’s proximity to Gaza and did not prohibit engaging in business there.

SO THE SAGES OF THE TALMUD knew Gaza well enough to know its geography and local customs. I don’t know how well my father knew his way around Gaza … I have a recollection of another professor in the passenger seat in the front, so perhaps that guy knew his way around better.

But it’s clear. There were days, two thousand years above and 55 years ago, when Jews went into Gaza freely, to engage in commerce, to attend to their health needs.

We’re a long, long way from that, but still—one can’t help but wonder and hope. Any chance that my grandchildren will one day just drive into Gaza for whatever reason?

That, too, remains to be seen.

I was in touch with Matan about El Ha-Degel, the new political party we’ve highlighted, and he mentioned that between Stars of the Desert and El Ha=Degel, he’d gone off to Harvard, for what he assumed would be the intellectual pinnacle of his education.

It didn’t quite work out that way. In fact, he ended up suing the university and winning—and I asked him to tell us his story. Today we hear about all three projects, and meet—once again—the kind of Israelis who are going to shape the future of this country.

You can follow Matan on his various social media platforms here.

Matan Yaffe was born in 1984 in Jerusalem, he served in the Armored Corps where he graduated with honors from an officer course.

Together with Dr. Muhammad Al-Nabari, he founded the organization "Stars of the Desert", which educates young Bedouin in entrepreneurship and leadership. Matan is also one of the founders of the “Kumzitz” association, which aims to bring together different segments of Israeli society.

Matan holds a master's degree in public administration from Harvard University. On October 7th, Matan was called up to the reserves and served about 300 days. At the same time, he founded the "Shoresh Foundation" with David Sherez and Chen Amit, which raised millions of shekels for the benefit of war victims.

Later, Matan turned to establish the organization “Tikun 2024” and continued with the organization’s leaders to found the “El Hadegel” movement and leads the movement’s approach on security issues.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

The last time I had the pleasure of having a long conversation with Matan Yaffe was in December of 2022, when he actually appeared on our podcast here at Israel From the Inside. I was in Jerusalem, and he was in Boston. We're going to hear the story today of why he was in Boston, writ large, and what happened in the years of Boston. Matan has done really extraordinary things in his relatively young life. Matan, first of all, thank you for joining us this time in person. It's great to be in the same country this time.Thank you. It's my pleasure.And before we talk about your experience at Harvard, just to give people a little bit of a hint where we're going. You ended up suing Harvard based on an experience that you had that you'll describe for us. But let's go way before Harvard. Tell us a little bit about how you grew up, about, let's say, your experience in the army, the major project that you initiated, which we spoke about in December of '22. And we're, of course, linking to that conversation today, so people can go back and hear it. Kol kohavei Hamidbar, Stars of the Desert, which is a program that you created for young Bedouines. You can maybe give us a quick reprise of the incident that led to the creation of that thing. Then you were also involved with El Hadegel, the new political party, which our listeners have heard about very recently because we interviewed David Sherez, who's also working with you, and we got incredible feedback about people are excited about new blood, new oxygen, new possibilities. Maybe you say something about El Hadegel and the new political party emerging, even though I know David already did it and you're other stuff today with us. Then we'll get to Harvard and that whole story. Tell us the story.Sounds good. You want me to begin from the beginning?Yeah. I mean, you were born. That's when you were born.I was born actually here in Jerusalem. I grew up in a very Zionist family here in Jerusalem, and that's the story of my life. For me, the whole concept of Israel as an independent state, as a safe home that needs to be prosperous the Jewish people here in the land of Israel, was always very fundamental in my life. I served in the IDF for six years as a combat officer, and since then in Miluim.How much reserve did you have done since the war started?340 days so far.There's five kids at home, right?I have five boys at home, Nevo, Negev, Arbel, Tavor, and Sinai, so five boys.We have a friend that just had a girl named Arbel. That's a great thing in Israeli society. A lot of these names could be for boys and girls at school.It's a modern thing, but yeah, you're right.It's a lot to leave five kids with a wife for 350 days.It's a lot to leave five kids and a wife for 350 days, but under the existential threat that we are now facing, and I think that I don't want to diminish the word existential threat. I think it's much wider than we used to grasp before October 7th. I think that that's one of the big failures of the Israeli state, that it assumed that the existence of Israel is secured, and now we can do other things, and each one of us can pull to a particular ideology that represent their own values at full. That has made us neglect many things that we needed to do to secure the existence of Israel that is far from being secured.You think even now, the existence of Israel is far from secure.Absolutely. I don't understand how you cannot see that. Looking at the world, looking at what's happening in all the diplomatic arena. Much of it, I'm not here to self-blame. However, instead of understanding what is happening, uniting the Zionist powers and actually do what needs to be done in order to make sure that your grandkids and my grandkids will be able to live here in a safe and prosperous home for them as Jews here in the land of Israel, instead of being united under that idea and do what needs to be done, we continue to do other things. That's our tragedy. To some extent, that ties up all the things that you just said about my personal journey in Desert Stars, in Harvard, and in El Hadegel. It's the attempt of building here the fundamentals that we need to make sure that our future is secure.Okay. We mentioned the army service, six years in the army, 350 days of reserve duty since the war began. That's how we got onto this last part. Then you found the Desert Stars, which we have a podcast about, so we'll let people listen to that. But just to remind people, because a lot of people have joined this community of listeners since the war started, and we did this way before the war. Just give people a little bit of sense of the story of how that actually started, because I think it says something about Israel, and it says a lot about you, because Other people might have responded very differently to the incident that took place, and it led you to create a program that is now about to become a brand new campus in a high school with seventh grade to 12th grade and hundreds of Bedouin kids studying in a Jewish area so that there's cross-cultural ferment going on. But how did this whole thing come to be?I will say that during my army service, I met quite a lot of Bedouins, and I developed stigmas and stereotypes that many of the Israelis, unfortunately, we have on the Bedouin community, very negative stigmas of them being thieves and criminals, etc. My story, my personal story with them, began at about 2012 when I had an off-road motorbike and I used to travel. In one of the trips, I traveled alone, and at some point, I saw a Jeep traveling with me. After a minute, I understood that they're not really traveling, but chasing me down. They go to me and took me off the path. Out of the Jeep came out four young Bedouins, probably 16 or 17 years old, very young, and started hustling me and negotiating my bike. Give it to us. We'll take it. We'll do this. We'll do that. I tried to talk my way out of the situation. It didn't work out very well. At some point, two of them went back to the Jeep and brought a metal bar. Quite unpleasant situation. Therefore, I'm on metal bar, middle of the desert. What these guys didn't know is that when I travel alone, I carry a gun with me.The gun, that's right on my chair right here. When I saw the metal bar, I pulled out my I told them, Look, if you want to be violent, I promise you I can do a better job than you can. I was slightly less polite, but the message was that. They understood, said some words to each other, went back to their Jeep, drove off. I went back home, hated all of them. All of the stigmas and stereotypes I had on them, got a face. But after a while, I understood that they're not going anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. We are doomed to live together regardless of what we think on one another. Because I understood that my kids, which I didn't have back then. But my future kids, it depends on my Bedouin neighbors, I understood that something needs to be done. I left everything I did, took a private loan of 31,000 shekels, and started going around meeting people and trying to harness them into the idea that we must develop a new generation of leadership amongst the Bedouin society who is able to actually integrate them within the Israeli state. That's how Desert Start was created, together with Mohamed Al-Nabari and many other people.I led this organization as the founder and CEO for a decade, and you interviewed me right at the end of it. The organization has grown to be one of, or probably the largest organization working in the Negev today. We're building the the hussid campus for Bedouin leadership. Like you said, it's the largest educational project that was built in Israel for many, many decades. Project about 27,000 square meters. Now we're opening the first stage, which is the Hussidman School that will include 600 students from all over the region of the Negev. Then we bring there also the dormitories and the leadership incubator and many other things that I'll be more than happy to elaborate, but that's the core.Okay. Now you're also doing El Hadegel, which is the party that we interviewed David Sherez about also. Because you're one of the main players in El Hadegel, just take a couple of minutes. You know what David said. I don't know if you've heard the interview, but you know what he said because I'm sure you guys talk and we each know each other's pitches very, very well. Give us your take on why this new political party is so critical to Israel's future.I'll tell you something personal. I came back from Harvard in August of '23, just before the war, and we were already then, this Israeli society was very, very polarized. Well, were on the verge of two wars. One of them We actually broke on October 7th, but we didn't look into this war. For me, this is the main failure. It's what I said earlier about the conception that we were so busy in ourselves and fighting for Israel to be exactly what we want that every group in the Israeli society, basically, even if they didn't say it in words, that's the underlying, they said, If the state is not exactly what they want, then what's the point in having a state? If it's not a Halakha state, what's the point? If it's not the full land of Israel, what's the point? If it's not a liberal lighthouse, what's the point? We were so busy in that that we've forgotten that the mere existence of the state is far from being secure. God, and that's what we need to do. Because of that, what actually happened is that we've looked away from many challenges that are threatening the state of Israel, and October 7th occurred.When October 7th it occurred, and I immediately went to the army, many of these old assumptions burnt for me, burnt, demolished, and were murdered. For me, when I came back in January after months of fighting, it was very clear for me that the state of Israel has changed forever.Because of October 7th.Because of October 7th. And the public has changed, and our political leaders are changed, and the media has changed. And imagine my surprise when I came back to the Israel that I left before and nothing have changed. The conversation was the same conversation. The politicians were the same politicians. Every one of them is doing the Heshbon Nefesh.Self examination of the other side. They're self-critical, but only self-critical for the others. They say, You see, they are to blame in everything that has happened. I understood it's an addiction. Every side became an addict for their narrative. There's so much sunk cost. Every Side has put so much energy into a certain narrative. The ability to say, wait, this narrative might be wrong, and I might need to listen to the other side and re examine my beliefs and my thoughts due to what has happened. But that's not what happened. Everyone went back to their core belief. When we came out from the Miluim and we saw that, we knew, sometimes you see something that you cannot forget. I think that what happened to us in the Miluim is that people that on October sixth were from the other side and were almost defined by us as enemies, became our best friends and people who will risk their life for us.Because they're in the tanks together or they're in the Nagmashim together or whatever they're in.Absolutely. We understood that we must take this energy from the battlefield and make sure it's being implemented on the Israeli political sphere. For a few months, we've been trying to influence them, them, the politicians. But very quickly, we understood that there's only one solution for this, and that's for all of them to disappear. All of the people who have touched this failing narrative that Israel has been living in the past decades-You're talking about politicians across the political spectrum.Across the political spectrum. People often hear that, and they're being offended. They But this politician, what is their fault? I'm saying, You know what? Don't remove 120. Remove only 119. Everyone can keep their single one. But we need fresh blood to enter the system, fresh blood, that does not people, who are not trying to integrate themselves into the political system, but rather disrupt it and change it, because today we're being led by two failing ideologies that each one of them prioritize a very particular set of belief above Zionism.What are those two ideologies?So one ideology in, I'll say the edges just to say. One ideology is that Israel needs to be a religious state, Eretz Israel, the full, the biblical land of Israel.The greater land of Israel.The greater land of Israel. And that's one ideology. And one ideology represents that Israel needs be a liberal lighthouse of morality, et cetera. Each side is willing to sacrifice Israel if it's not what they want it to be. I'm willing to sacrifice their own ideologies in order to Israel to be. That's a crucial difference. Now, I didn't invent it because Zionism was born, and we didn't even invent this argument, Daniel. In the end of the 19th century, the Jewish world was divided. Some people isolated themselves said, We need to reserve ourselves and build gettos to ourselves. Some said, We need to assimilate and become like others. Then Herzel and the Zionist movement came and kicked both of these ideologies aside and said, No, we need to build an independent state. That was the creation of Zionism, the idea. 40, 50 years down the line, Zionism became very practical with Yitzchak Sade and Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, et cetera. The state of Israel was created. Now, when we look at Ben Gurion and his generation, we see that their first, second, third, and 10th priority was the mere existence of the State of Israel. How do I know it? Because if at a certain point of time they needed to be with Communist Russia, then they were. If the next day they needed to be with France and England, et cetera, then they were with them because they didn't care not about Russia, not about France and England. They cared only about one thing, the existence of Israel. That was the compass. That was the lighthouse. Every day, the strategical situation of the state of Israel became better. Imagine that in these first decades that we were really under a severe existential threat. Still, all of the great big things that we've built were built then. All of our universities, all of our hospitals.The National Water Carrier. All the infrastructures that today make us flourish were built in the first four decades. Even the high tech and nation that we are is all sitting on foundations of the past because people prioritize the existence of Israel and how it turned better by the day. But now we have a generation of politicians and not leaders I want to distinguish between these two words. It's not the same. We are being led by politicians who do politics, who are popular, who are playing a game with our lives and not by true leaders. They must go because their failed ideologies are not representing the core of Zionism. That's what we're trying to do. We don't try to influence them because we can't. We want to create an alternative in El Hadegel. We say, and we come, and we need, We need a new generation of Zionism. It's your time to step aside and our time to step in, take responsibility, and lead Israel to be what it needs to be. There are many questions that this statement now opens. My biggest fear is us in 10 years. How will we not turn into them? Because I'm so fearful of that, I've dealt quite a lot in putting on ourselves all the needed restrictions in order to make sure that we don't slip this slippery slope. Okay. It's already clear to people who are listening to you that you're a person who sees a problem and you address it. You get followed, quote, unquote, or traveled with by this Jeep with four Bedouin kids, and you see the day itself was very unpleasant. But when you went home, you actually had the very different response from what most people would have. Most people would say, that just confirms all my suspicions. These guys are horrible, and I'm going to make sure they don't get any power or whatever. And you said, no, I'm going to help them become different. We're going to build a different relationship. You came out of the army after all these days of reserve duty, and you're now saying there's a problem in Israel's political system. We're going to change it. We're going to build a new political party. You see a problem, you address it. You went to Harvard a couple of years ago to go to the Kennedy School, and you bumped into a problem. Let's talk a little bit about why you went to the Kennedy School, what were you hoping to accomplish there, and then the specific thing that occurred, and and how it's played out.I'll be very honest with you. My reason to go to the Kennedy School was not Harvard, nor the Kennedy School. I wanted to spend a year abroad with my family, and I understood that the only way for me to actually fund it was through getting a scholarship, and I applied for the Wexner program, and I happily was accepted. In June of '22, where I flew with my wife, Aviv, and my five kids to Cambridge, and to one of the most magnificent years of my life. In that sense, the living abroad opened my eyes, exposed my kids to English, and we traveled the West Coast of the United States for two months and Canada for one month. It was It was incredible. Harvard, for me in person, was something that I needed to do until it became super interesting. I'll tell you two things that for me stood out in Harvard in my time there. One was that I took an Arabic course, and I got four books, four study books for Arabic. Four textbooks. In all the textbooks, All the texts that we needed to read were about Palestine. At some point, I looked and said, That's weird. We have so many Muslim countries. Why only Palestine? It suddenly stood out to me that while we were sleeping on our It was like we say in Hebrew, I'm not sure.Sleeping on our watch, that was the American phrase.While we were sleeping on our watch, the other side has been working, and they created a very vast network of explaining of advocacy for themselves in many, many layers. Some of them are very clever, light textbook, not just direct. That was one meaningful thing for me to understand how we, the startup nation, the nation that can really solve any problem, we were not focused on the right things. We were focused on many other things, but not in make sure that Israel has the infrastructure to flourish for another 100 years forward. That's a failure of this state.It's a failure of telling the story of the state, right?Exactly.It's a failure of Hasbara, as we would say.It's a failure of Hasbara, exactly. The system of Hasbara does not exist. Now, many people take it to the place of self-blaming and to say the product of the state of Israel is not good enough. I want to quote here Ben Gurion who said, We need to fight the Nazis as if there's no white book and fight the white book as if there's no Nazis. We need to fight anti-Semitism, and soon I'll get to it, as if Israel is perfect. We need to fight to make Israel perfect as if the world is perfect. El Hadegel is my battle to make Israel perfect. The anti-Semitism and the Hasbara is my fight against this evil, evil that exists in the world. The second incident that happened in Harvard for me was that I took a course in the Kennedy School. In this course, I had a good relationship with the professor to begin with. A very good relationship. I met him even before the course, and I presented him the work that I want to do. All of my works in the Kennedy School were on one topic. Can you guess?Zionism, Israel, et cetera.Exactly. Easy guess. All of them. Because I went there and I wanted to extract real value that is very practical. Like you said, for me, nothing theoretical. I want to implement. I did works on Israel, like all the papers on Israel. I presented him the program, the plan, what I wanted to do together with Amnon, who studied with me also in Israeli. He loved it. He loved it. He accepted us to the course, and everything was good. Then on the first, it was an intensive course, two weeks, two weekends, two straight weekends. On the first day of the official course, things started to not work according to plan. First of all, he had many TAs, teacher assistants, and about seven, four of them gave examples of what you need to do in the course. It doesn't matter to present something. Four of them presented something that is anti-Israeli, something about Gaza, something about Lebanon. That was peculiar. It was weird. But they said, All right, whatever. We didn't take it too seriously. Let's say it like that. Then we presented what we want to do, and everything was fine. At the end of the first day, I get an email, Please come and meet me in my office, urgently.This is from the professor? Okay, now I understand that you, by virtue of the agreement that's been signed with Harvard, you can't say anything about who the professor was or the course. All I'll say is on my laptop, there is this thing called Google If you go around, it appears very likely that the course you're talking is about, is Professor Marshall-Gantz's course called Organizing People, Power, and Change. Just put it out there. It looks like it might be the course. But anyway, okay, so the professor calls you in and says, and says, You must change the topic of the work that you're doing.It was so bizarre because the work was about Israel as a liberal and Jewish democracy that needs to be prosperous for all its citizens. Something super, I don't know, for me, neutral. He said, You must change it. We told him, How come? He says, It's offensive. I can't support nations that prioritize race or religion, et cetera. I went to the same Google you just mentioned, and I asked him the question about nations that define themselves according to religious or ethnicity, whatever. 48% of the world's nation define themselves like that, including 100% of the Muslim states, of course, which many of the students in the course were from these Muslim states. I told them, but why is it different? All these states how they find themselves. It's not exactly the same. When you say a Jewish democracy, it's like white supremacy. I told them, How come white supremacy? I told them, You know what? Forget it. You are a professor here for 40 years. Have you ever asked a student to change the topic. This is academy, we come to speak, and I'm more than happy if the topic of the work bothers someone, I'm more than happy to discuss it, to explain it, to have a conversation about it, use it as an academic opportunity to actually open it and maybe we can educate one another and see that what we used to think is not necessarily what is. Let's use it. No, you have to change the topic. You have until tomorrow to submit a new topic. We went out and we were shocked.

Now, I'll be very honest with you. I'm 40 years old. I'm an IDF combat officer. I have kids. I'm married. I'm Israeli. I have backbone. It didn't move me on the emotional level. However, I understood that had I been an 18-year-old American that actually takes this degree seriously in terms of affecting their life, 100% they would break and it would change the topic. Once I understood that, I came out of his office and I said to Amnon who was with me, and we looked at each other and I told him, This is the most important thing we are going to do this year. We're going to fight this battle all the way to the end to get one thing, impact. I want this to never happen again. I know it's naive, but the way to make sure it won't happen again is to not give up even on a sentiment there.

The next day we came, he told us, What's your new topic? We said, No new topic, same topic. He, stupidly have sent me an email that we must change the topic until the end of the next day or it'll have consequences. Over email, I sent an email back, said, What consequences? What do you mean? He He said, Academical consequences, etc. From that point onward, all the groups presented, it's a course of 150 students, all the other groups were presented, were able to present their progress in the work to the entire class. We could not. We asked, he said, You caused enough damage. I don't want you to do it. We told him, You're just being anti-Semitic.By the way, assuming that Google is correct, and it was as Professor Marshall Gantz. He is also, according to Google, Jewish. You're telling this Jewish professor at Harvard, assuming that that was him, that he's being anti-Semitic. Just adds a little bit of complexity to the story. It's not surprising that this person would be Jewish because it's a not uncommon position among American Jews. But I just think that adds a little bit of spice to the story.Absolutely. Especially, Daniel, in this environment where you're trying to be, we say in Hebrew, more just than the Pope. You're trying to prove everyone that you're so Enlighted that you don't see the bishop on your back. Anyway, that was absurd for us. From day to day, it became worse. You suddenly saw that all the TAs are doing an extra effort for every present that they do to speak about the topic of Israel-Palestine. Before the war. We're speaking about the winter of 2023. So eight months, nine months before war. We, of course, continued with the work. We submitted it the last day when they do a photo of all the people in the course. A student brought a handbag with 50 kafias, and gave everyone, including the professor, whoever it was.Everybody put it on?Of course, they put it on. They took a picture and we said, All right, we are going all the way with that. Yeah, I know. It's crazy. It's right.I'm stunned because I read some stuff online about this whole thing, both in the Hebrew press and in the English press. I don't think that little tidbit got in there. If it did, I missed it. But again, this whole Kafia thing. People think the Kafia thing is a post October 8th, they say, because that's when Israel started to pound Gaza. This is long, long, long before.Much before. Absolutely. No, it was crazy. We came out, finished this course, and we said, All right, we need impact. Then we were trying to understand what's the next phase is for us. Then someone connected us to the Brandai Center, which I think probably most of your listeners know them, and to Ken, and we started working with them. They said, of course, that there's a lot of material here and much that can be done and should be done. They gave us an extraordinary service in that sense. They were incredible, and we were working with them. Basically, the process with them is that first we sent a letter to the dean asking them to say this is outrageous, and we want sanctions, personal sanctions on that date.On the professor? Yes. To begin with, that's what we wanted. Then they sent some letter basically says nothing, and we started publishing more and more op-eds in all the papers. You can see it also in Google and in the website.Without to finish the course, did you get credit for the course?I did, but lower grades than all the rest of the courses we took.That's going to hold your career back. Absolutely.It sits on me until today. Once we understood that really nothing substantial, they appointed an investigator of their behalf that was supposedly external. She interviewed us. She interviewed all the people in case, wrote a good American report of 200 pages. But the bottom line was that title nine and all these things were violated, and that created an unsafe environment for us.For you and Amnon.Yes, correct. It created an unsafe environment. From that point on, and then they offered mental support. We told them, We don't want mental support. We want implementation of a reality to make sure this will never happen again. Nothing serious came about it. We filed a lawsuit. Again, They were using the Brandai Center. They did the legal work. Then through the process, several times, they tried to say, Okay, we'll do this, we'll do that. But it was all count to nothing. At some point, they filed to the court. I'm not sure about the legal phrase, but you can interview, you can. You'll be more than happy to expand it. But they filed something to the court to dismiss it, to say that it's not worth it to go to court. But the threw them out and said that it was and it is going to court. At that point, it was already after October 7th, so the whole climate became more rough for them. Also, several others complaints have joined our complaint.That was Shabbos Kestenbaum.Shabbos Kestenbaum and others. Suddenly, there was a mess. Then a few months ago, they offered a settlement, which I'll tell you the truth, we had a big dilemma whether we need to sign it off, the big achievement of the settlement was for them to adopt the IHRA policy, which the IHRA policy is the policy against anti-Semitism. That basically, to simplify, it says that anti-Israeli and anti-Semitism are the same, and both are not allowed. Now, we didn't know, I'll say it like that, we suspected that it won't be implemented properly. But we understood that saying no to this won't serve us in the long run because we are positive people. We don't want to fight.Well, also you'll be the naysayers. Everybody will say, We tried to help, and you guys turned it down.Including the court, that if we'll go to court. We understood that, and there was a dilemma there, and it was a discussion Eventually, we decided, again, with one opinion, with the Brandai Center, to sign the settlement and to come in good faith. Let's say it like that. We come in good faith. You say you'll implement the IHRA, come on, let us see it. There's a window of time that in that time, they need to appoint someone that will be in charge of that and do some process. We are supposed to go back there in the next few months and do a seminar on the work that we were not allowed by the professor to submit.And he's supposed to come to this? He's supposed to be part of it? Yes. The professor is going to be part of this when you go?I certainly hope so. Maybe he'll call in sick, but supposedly He should come and other people from the staff should come, et cetera. I will tell you that through this time, there was one staff member who I won't say his name because I don't want to put him in trouble, but he was great and was very supportive of us. And he told me, It's crazy. Israel is very unique in one thing. When people don't like their administration, they say the state doesn't have the right to exist. In the same time, I remind you, it's the Ukraine, Russia war, et cetera. He said, You don't see anyone going around saying Russia doesn't have the right to exist. They say, Putin is a bad leader. With Israel, the jump between we don't like the administration to the state doesn't have a right to exist is immediate. In that sense, I think that our battle was very important to also show this young 18 year old American student anywhere in the States that when you stand up and when you fight for that, we can definitely bend even the top of the Ivy League University. It's crucial because our That settlement now became the benchmark for the entire universities in Israel, because so far, the higher policy was adopted only by very few institutions and not the Ivy League institutions. Now, when the settlement is signed, that becomes the new benchmark. But for me and for us, it's not the end of the story. We look very closely at every violation of the higher policy.At Harvard or beyond Harvard?At Harvard. Because my case is with Harvard. And once we'll understand they crossed the threshold of things that happened that violate the policy, we will definitely go back and say, If that will happen, I don't want to assume that it will happen. I come in good faith. But if that will happen, be sure that they will find us there saying this is a core violation of the settlement and go for another round. This time, we We said, yes, we came in good faith. We wanted it to work. It didn't work. Let's make sure that now we do all the needed corrections in order to make sure that this will never, ever happen again. And that's what I meant in fighting anti-Semitism as if Israel is perfect. Because the fact that I like or dislike the administration in Israel, and just to be honest, I hate it, and I fight against it here with all of my power, despite the fact I'm in Miluim all of my time, I left I don't work. I don't do anything apart from establishing El Hadegel. Nevertheless, this fight against anti-Semitism and against the outrageous discrimination and weaponization of all b******t, forgive my French, to hurt Israel, we must stand united against it.Not we, Israel, we, the Jewish people. That's another failure of the state, that they were not able to unite the Jewish people globally to be together and to feel a shared future. Even all the things that are happening with the religious here, conservative reform, etc. The state of Israel needs to be the best place for every Jewish person to live at, not some Jewish people, all the Jewish people. If it won't be the best place to live at, it won't exist. I know it deep in my heart, I really believe in that. That's why, again, we're fighting these two venues at once to make Israel better and against anti-Semitism.Can I ask you two last questions before we wrap up? One of them is about your experience at Harvard. I don't think a lot of people probably experience somebody like you standing up to the culture. I think you had this incident long before this course, right? About some incident when we're talking about the legacy of white people, European people. I'm I'm not quite sure. And you modeled for people, had nothing to do with this course, had nothing to do with Israel, standing up for something in a way that I think Israelis would say, well, of course, but for a lot of Americans was actually surprising and unusual. Can you give us a quick reprise of that?Yeah. So first I have to say that Israel is not a political correct state, not the state, and definitely not the people. In that sense, the whole encounter with Harvard was very new and interesting for me to see how these things are going. The opening seminar in the Kennedy School in this program was about, it's two months about race, racism, and colonialism. For me, it was a brand new topic. I admit I knew nothing about the American history, apart from the things that everyone know, but they didn't know. It was very interesting to learn and to see, and to also see the many, many wrongs that were being done over there to the Afro-Americans and to the Indians, et cetera, et But for two months straight, all the lectures that they brought us told about how horrible everything was. I'm not judgmental. I came and I listened and I learned. It was incredible.

However, apart from all these blaming against all the white people on how terrible it was, at some point it became ridiculous because you understand that there's no complexity in how they present reality. There are good people, bad people, c'est tout. For me, that bothered me because I understand that reality is more complex than that. At some point, there's the central corridor in the Kennedy School. They call it the Forum, and there was a lecture, and I stood up and I took the mic and I told them, I understand that the white people here did many terrible things and used people and the Sugar plantations, and slavery, everything. I understand everything, and I'm really not cynical about it. I genuinely understand it. In order for me to establish a point of view that is balanced and not polarized, are there also any good things that these people are doing? Because we're standing here in the United States of America, all in all, apart from all the terrible things that have happened here and happened all around the world through history, your state is quite good, I would say, quite strong, quite prosperous, US, economy, army, leader of the free world. Can you also present some good things that have happened so we'll be able to come out here with a balanced point of view? Again, I'm not politically correct. I didn't understand just how much this reaction will backfire. So many people, Yeah, how are you there to say it, et cetera, et cetera. The interesting thing for me that many people offline, after school, came to me, me a way to go to stand up. I told them, I don't know if you can swear in this podcast. I told them, Are you morons? Why aren't you speaking? We used to say in the army that if you don't do anything, you do nothing. When you don't try to balance, then people get a wrong concept of the state. I'm not here to diminish anything from the wrongs that were done. And everywhere in Australia and in New Zealand, we all know the history in that sense. But we must be more balanced in how we see the world and present both sides, the goods and the bad, learn from the bad, and increase the good. But it can't be so unsighted and so twisted because that creates a very unbalanced world, like we see today, by the way, that is very polarized, that it's binary, one or zero, no complexity, no middle, and that is a catastrophic. It's a catastrophe for democracies. It's a catastrophe for liberalism because You see that the circle ends up by that the far right and the far left are actually the same. They represent the same opinions. They do covenant in political systems between the far right and the far left.

And I see it even Here in Israel, we talked about the Bedouins. There was a settlement with the Bedouins above the lands. You know who voted against the settlement? You guess right. The far right who didn't want the Bedouins to have nothing, and the far left who wanted them to have everything. That's the craziness of the world. By not speaking up to this awfulness, we allow it to happen. We, the normal people, and in Israel, they're a majority. I'm sure that also in the United States, I hope it's not some criticism for me of people. But I think that the people who are balanced must speak up. We must stand up and say our opinion, and we need to fight for it because otherwise, we leave the court empty. The extremists, they take the mic. Be sure of that.Okay, to wrap up, you talked about the two battles that you're waging. You said the white paper, we're going to fight the Nazis as if there's no white paper. What's white paper in English? The white paper And the one fight the white paper is if there's no Nazis. That was Ben Gurion's famous claim and whatever. So you're saying you're fighting these two battles. We're going to fight anti-Semitism as if this world's perfect, and we're going to fight to make it as well perfect as if there's no anti-Semitism, or if the world was perfect. So you spoke now about one of the two battles, the anti-Semitism battle. I just want to come back to Israel, and we'll wrap up on this. You're pouring your heart and your soul into this whole project called El Hadegel. Your whole life has been, as you said, from the time that you were raised by your family, not far from here, Zionism and belief in the importance of the Jewish state has been just part of the DNA of how you were raised and who you are as a human being, I'm sure, as a father now yourself. Give us your take on why you're optimistic that we're going to become not perfect because country is going to become perfect, but why are you optimistic about our survival and our increasing decency.It's a good question. First of all, we talked a lot about Ben Gurion. So Ben Gurion said that in Israel, the miracle is part of the strategy. So definitely in these times, both globally and nationally, we need a miracle. But in order for miracle to happen, we need to allow it to happen. And I think that in Israel, a We have many obstacles and many challenges and many reasons why. But we also have a good reason why we must fight with everything we have. I think that the good news is that the positive energies in Israel, still within the nation, you have the ultra-autodox, which is for us a big fight, especially now in these two years where they don't want a draft. They say, We'll die and we won't draft in this existential war. We have 20% of the population here that are Arabs. We have very large extremes on both ends. Still, nevertheless, the majority of Israelis are what I quote from the third sector. They are too quiet. They don't have political representation. But I think that in their core, they are people who, when I look at them, there's no other place I would rather be.Now, unfortunately, these people, because they're balanced, for many, many years, they've neglected all the public arenas. For me, the good news is that when these people act together, they win. The bad news is they need to act together. So far for a few decades, they haven't. Now, October 7th was the most biggest tragedy we can imagine in a life. But it did also open a window of an an opportunity, probably the last window of an opportunity to actually come back into the Zionist way, which is the one thing that worked for us for 2000 years. I see that people are anxious for new blood, for new answers, for new direction. We do about 20 house gatherings every month. People want to hear more. They want to make it happen. Now, it's a big challenge. It cost a lot of money. I never wanted to be a politician. Never in my life. I didn't want to be the chairperson of my high school nor the university. It was never my intention. I'm an entrepreneur, and the rest of us, we come from different backgrounds. But for me, Daniel, this is a war. Like I fight. When they call me to the army, I go and fight. Here on my civil uniforms, I fight with everything I got because it's an existential fight. I can't tell you the house is burning and be intellectual about it and be theoretical about it and say, The house is burning. It's very bad. No, if the house is burning, we jump and we fight. We need to bring the water hose. We need to jump inside and bring the people. We do everything in our power.

We don't have the luxury nor the privilege to give up because so many people have sacrificed everything they have in order for this miracle of the state of Israel to exist. People that have lived here for hundreds of years, people who lived in America and in Europe and funded this miracle we call Israel. We used to work together. We We used to build great things. We used to bring ideas that were the chances, and maybe this is a good wrap-up, the chances of us establishing a state back in the '40s was far, far lower than our chances now of making this state the dream of every Jew person in the world. I think that this is the opportunity that all of us, you, me, our listeners from all around the globe, this is now our opportunity to step in, not to step back and to see what's happening. No, the contrary, to take a step forward and say, This is on me. There was a generation here that took all the weight and all the burden and established this miracle and now it's on us. Every person that listens to me doesn't have the privilege to close your amazing podcast and say, that was interesting and intellectual. No, there is something that must be done about it, and I'll be more than happy for people to reach out and to consult and to help either in the war with anti-Semitism or on the war on making Israel perfect. It doesn't matter. But we must act. The people who are balanced, who want to live a better life, who understand that the contradictions is part of Judaism. It's not something that either or. No, it's this and that. We want both ends, and it can be. Our chances of making it happen are far better than what it was in the '40s. They have been able to do it. We will be able to do it, too, if we work together.No better way to end than that. Matan Yaffe, who really, I think, embodies the very, very best of Zionism here in Israel and Zionism when you go abroad. Thank you for all you've done. Thank you for who you are, and thank you for taking the time to have this conversation with us today.Thank you so much for this exposure, and hopefully we'll be able to combine forces and work together and save Israel and save the world. It's on us.

Yossi, with a keen historical awareness born of his Holocausts-survivor parents, has also argued consistently that the State of Israel has a moral obligation to ensure that no committed enemy of the Jewish people ever obtains the possibility of attacking the Jews with weapons of mass destruction. For that reason, he has long advocated that Israel do whatever was needed to take out Iran’s nuclear program.

Now, that has happened. We spoke with Yossi about his feelings post the Iran War and Israel’s accomplishments — but mostly, we turned our attention to the future. What now needs to be healed in Israeli society? What was broken, and by whom? What would it take to make things better, and who has to go to make that possible?

Yossi Klein Halevi was born in Brooklyn and moved to Israel in 1982. He is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

In 2013 he was a visiting professor of Israel Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary and served as a writer in residence at the University of Illinois. He was a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem from 2004 until 2010.

He writes for leading op-ed pages in the US, including the Times and the Wall Street Journal, and is a former contributing editor to the New Republic. He is also an published writer and has written four books: Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist (1995), At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land (2001), Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation (2013), and Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (2018) which was a New York Times Bestseller.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

When things in Israel get complicated, which, of course, they often do, and I want to hear someone think out loud in a way that mirrors my own moral anguish at times, but who infuses me nonetheless with a sense of purpose and optimism, with level-headed analysis and much, much more. Almost invariably, my soul and my mind go to my friend Yossi Klein Halevi. Yossi Klein Halevi, as many of you know, is really, I think, one of the leading thinkers and writers in the English language about Israel today. He's written a number of books. I will mention his most famous best-selling book, Like Dreamers, the story of the Israeli paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem and divided a nation. Interesting Interestingly enough, his most recent book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, became a New York Times best seller. At a different point in time, and we're not going to do it today, it would be really very interesting to talk to Yossi a little bit about whether or not he would frame that book in quite the same way, given that everything that we have been through.Yossi Klein Halevi, as I'm sure most of our listeners know, and we will, of course, include full biographic information in the notes for today's conversation, is a senior fellow at the Shalom Heart Ministry Institute in Jerusalem. His 2013 book, which I mentioned, won the Jewish Book Council's Everett Book of the Year award. Another is for My Palestinean neighbor. As I said, it was a New York Times best seller. He writes leading op-ed pages in the US, including The Times, The Wall Street Journal. He's a former contributing editor to the New Republic. You can hear him on the Shalem Hartman Institute podcast with Daniel Hartman very often. He's everywhere as well he should be because he's really a unique voice in in the Jewish world. Yossi, first of all, thank you for your friendship, and thank you for taking the time on what for all of us is, I think, both a very busy week, and frankly, a little bit of a PTSD week. We're still coming out of whatever we were in to share some thoughts today. I really want to talk to you more about Israel's future and its soul. But before we get there, I want to acknowledge that of all of the people who have been, I think, people, men and women who the American Jewish center and left have come to really revere, I think you're the only one who for years has been unabashedly calling for an Israeli strike on Iran.I know that this is very deeply affected by your family's own Holocaust history and your parents' experience and so on and so forth, your own profound sense of the way in which Israel needs to erase Jewish vulnerability to whatever extent that it could. But again, you are really among the very few people who have been rapidly listened to on the left and in the center who have been saying this for years. So you'll see, now we've done it, and we don't know exactly what we've accomplished yet, but it certainly appears that we did some major damage to their program. Talk to me about how you're feeling after so many years of calling for this, now that the Jewish State finally did what it did.Danny, it's great to be with you, and I'm really grateful to your podcast. If for no other reason, it gives us a chance to see each other and exchange ideas. Really a pleasure. I'd also like to acknowledge that my partner in the work that I did on Iran, especially the writing, over the years, was Michael Oren. We started 20 years ago. We started writing about the Iranian threat and very actively supporting Netanyahu's campaign to galvanize the international community and speaking. Then, of course, when Michael became ambassador, he took that commitment several considerable steps forward. Much, if not most, of what I know about the Iranian threat, aside from what my own Jewish gut tells me, really comes from Michael. That's really the background to my answer to you, which is, first of all, I feel this enormous sense of relief. Also, it just feels a little bit surreal. After all these years of warning and urging Israel to launch a preemptive strike, Michael and I never urge the United States to get involved militarily. We were asking for the ordinance that we would need to launch a strike, but we felt that we didn't have the right as Israelis to make those demands of America.That President Trump was right to recognize that Iran is not just an Israeli problem. It's a scandal that so much of the international community has not recognized that. But Michael and I, from the beginning, felt that our focus needs to be on Israel, and we need to take responsibility for our own defense. There's not only this this deep sense of relief that I feel, and also, I should say, gratitude. Gratitude to two leaders whom I feel ambivalent about. Well, regarding Netanyahu, I don't feel any ambivalence about. As you and I were partners in another effort to deal with what we regarded as a different existential threat, an internal threat that was presented by Netanyahu's coalition. That was the threat to the Israeli success story, to startup nation, that Netanyahu's assault on the judiciary and on the democratic ethos was really an assault on the foundations of what has made Israel a modern, successful country. I don't think that was fully appreciated by many diaspora Jews, that where you and I were coming from was not only trying to save Israeli democracy, but more deeply, trying to save the Israeli edge that we have over our enemies.What's played out in the skies of Iran in these last couple of weeks is an expression of startup nation. What worried us, if I could speak for you as well, and I think on this, I do. What worried us most deeply of all was that this coalition of ultra-nationalists and ultra-Orthodox was threatening to undermine our long-term ability to maintain our security advantage over our enemies. When I say that this was an existential threat, I mean that literally. And yet, the attack, Israel's preemptive attack on Iran, compelled me to issue a public expression of gratitude to Netanyahu. You know the expression that is ze ole li labriut [it a cost to my health]? It was very hard.I felt he deserved our gratitude, not only for this strike, but for leading the campaign for the last two decades against a nuclear Iran, and doing so in the face of ridicule, in the face of accusations of warmongering. He held the line. One of the surreal aspects of this time for me is publicly acknowledging and appreciating the man who I otherwise regard as an existential threat to Israel. Of course, the other surreal element here is that all these years, my assumption, at least, was that if we would launch a preemptive strike and then America would join in with its bunker busters and its ability to maintain constant pressure on Iran, there's no question that we would eliminate the nuclear threat at least for 5, 10 years, giving the Iranian people the time to bring the regime down. And by weakening the prestige of the regime, also weakening its its capacity to instill terror within the Iranian people. Will it play out that way? It still might. We don't know. But in the end, for me, the question isn't whether we've uprooted their nuclear capacity entirely or whether we've dealt with not only their hardware, but their knowledge.We've tried to do that, of course, by assassinating scientists. But the deeper question, the most important long-term question is, will a strike against Iran, would a strike against Iran, undermine the regime from within. That remains the big unknown. My sense is that in the short term, our strike will lead to a rallying around the regime because that's a natural instinct. The Iranian people are no less patriotic than we are. But my hope is, and more than a hope, really, is that the morning after the morning after, they're going to look around and say, Where has this regime led us? It's one disaster after another. The Islamic Revolution is destroying Iran and Iranian civilization. So that's still my very active hope for this moment.Thanks for that. I want to talk about one other piece of this Iran puzzle before we move on to something that has really nothing to do with Iran, which is the main focus today, which is healing Israel's soul. But when you and Mati Friedmann and I wrote those two pieces in the Times of Israel, already a few years ago, it was during the height of the judicial reform crisis. We were trying to convince Americans, American Jews, particularly, that to be a supporter of Israel did not mean always to support its Prime Minister. And in fact, at that point, to be a genuine, loving supporter of Israel meant to come out on the side of those who were opposing judicial reform because we saw that as an existential threat to the state that we love and care about. I think it's fair to say that there was not an overwhelming response of people calling the heads of all the various organizations, which we won't mention now, and saying to their leadership, You know what? We've actually changed our mind. It didn't happen. We got some support. We took some heat. That's the way the world works.That's fine. But if you, back in the day when you and Michael were working at the Shalem Center, and I then joined a little bit later, and the three of us were hanging around on the third floor on Yosua Binun Street, and you guys were really working very hard on the Iranian nuclear stuff, among other things, I think we I would have guessed if we had had a cup of coffee up there on the third floor, that if the day ever came, that Israel attacked Iran's nuclear program with the endorsement and participation of the President of the United States and American military, that American Jews would somehow say, Oh, my God, thank you. Thank you, Israel. Thank you, America. Thank you, God, if one is inclined that way. This is a great day in the history of the relationship between Israel and America, and it's a great day for the Jewish state. We've heard some of that, but we've heard a lot of not that as well. I wonder what you think has changed in the last 20 years that have made some American Jews on the center and the right unable to critique Bibi because any critique of Bibi, even when he's destroying the judicial system, feels somehow unpatriotic and almost treasonous.On the other hand, this inability of many American Jews who obviously hate war, as do you and I, to come out and say, This was a necessary thing. This was the right thing. We applaud it. There hasn't been nearly as much of that as we would have imagined there might be 20 years ago. What do you think that's about?I think we're experiencing the consequences of two developments. The first is the rise, the empowerment of the global lynch mob against Israel. The mainstreaming of frankly genocidal slogans like "From the River to the Sea" and "Globalize the Intifada". That has had a chilling effect on the willingness, understandably, of many Jews, not only on the right, also in the center, and some on the center left, to publicly criticize Israel and join the lynch mob. We were experiencing experiencing some of that blowback, you, me, and Mati, when we wrote our open letter. I'm sure you heard this, too, and I heard it from many of my friends in America. You're asking us to join in the movement to delegitimize Israel. I said, No, we're actually not. They said, Yes, okay, but it will have that consequence. On the other side, for liberal Jews, the rise of this government really catalyzed a long-term trend of understandable, justifiable anxiety about where Israel is heading morally, the deepening of our rule over another people, Israel being turned gradually, but seemingly inevitably, into a binational state, in which the only way we can retain power is by denying the Palestinians any citizenship. When you put these two forces together, you really come up with, I think, part of what we've experienced in the last couple of years and maybe culminating in the Iranian attack.Do you have any hope that this turn of events might begin to heal the rift between Israel and some American Jews, or is it your sense that we're just going to see a winding and a deepening?In terms of liberal American Jewry, it depends how long this government lasts. Liberal Jewish friends of Israel, and certainly liberal non-Jewish friends of Israel, and they still exist. That's something we really shouldn't forget. They can somehow, or many of them can somehow stomach the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian people because we have compelling security arguments for that. But when you combine that with the assault on civil liberties in Israel, the contempt for non-Orthodox denominations, which is another way of telling American Jews that we don't respect your Jewish identity, and we don't even respect the Jewishness, the literal Jewishness of many of you. The combined impact of the internal and external right-wing turn is going to have inevitably devastating consequences. I don't place all the blame on the government. Certainly, there are trends within the liberal American Jewry that are very destructive on their own terms. The fact that the last repository of wokeness sometimes seems to be parts of American Jewry. We don't need to go any farther than the 20% of New York Jews who apparently supported Mahdani's candidacy, which, as we say in Hebrew, ein milim, no words. There are native homegrown destructive tendencies within American Jewry that have met and converged with the destructive tendencies in Israel.What worries me deeply about the future of the relationship between the two great population centers of the Jewish people, and when we talk about the Jewish people today, we're really talking about Israel and American Jewry with some support systems around the world, but close to not quite as close to 90 %. If American Jewry and Israel continue to distance from each other to the point where we no longer share the most minimal Jewish language and sensibility, then the Jewish people effectively becomes dysfunctional. You and I are among those who share this dual identity. We still are in some sense, you and I, I think, American Jews. We never left the community. You and I are among those who have really made it our career and mission to live on the Ben Gurion-JFK Line and to devote ourselves to trying to strengthen the relationship, to salvage the relationship. It's particularly painful for us to see what's happening. My deepest worry for the future health of the relationship is twofold. First of all, it's the growing inability of each community to understand or even particularly take interest in the Jewish life that the other has created and on the fringes of both communities, we're seeing the rise of deeply destructive forces.In Israel, the growing threat of anti-democracy. Among American Jewry, a growing, if still, fringe phenomenon of Jewish anti-Zionism. If these two trends continue to grow, we will lose any ability to feel that we share the same fate. Israel that is not democratic and a liberal American Jewry that is not Zionist have nothing, literally nothing in common. There's no shared languages, no shared commitment. We're two separate peoples. And that causes me to lose sleep.Understandably. And I share the loss of sleeps. And I want to come to this question about the future of the soul of Israel. We're speaking a week-ish after the ceasefire. We have not gone to the shelter.We could spell week in two ways.Right. In two different ways.Depending how it plays out.Yes, I meant W-E-E-K, but the W-E-A-K could also fit here. But we're a week more or less after the war. We're seeing, I think, a still ongoing sense of trauma and deeply shaken people. We were frightened in a way that we weren't necessarily, those of us in Jerusalem, which wasn't hit at all, we're not necessarily frightened for our own skin, though we had no way to know that they wouldn't change their minds and start hitting Jerusalem, too. But to watch my grandchildren and to see other people in in safe rooms and in shelters and to watch little kids not really understand why everybody's a bit stressed out, even if we're trying to pretend that we're not stressed out and why we're waking them up in the middle of the night and cuddling with them in the middle of this dark room with the window bolted shut and all that. So this is a country very much in PTSD, which we won't get to now. But it's also a country that I think is beginning to look ahead. Now, let's just say hypothetically, we don't know where this is going, but let's just say hypothetically, we're able to shut down the Gaza War in the next few weeks, as many people are beginning to speak about publicly.Let's say, hypothetically, we don't know that there's a deal being cooked up with Trump in which in some way that gets us the hostages back, though it's far from clear what leverage anyone has on Hamas at this point. But let's assume that somebody knows something that we don't know and we can get the hostages back. Some Arab countries take responsibility for Gaza. Israel gets partial sovereignty over parts of the West Bank. What some people are saying is going to happen, Syria and Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords. Donald Trump gets his Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe he shares it with Bibi Netanyahu. Okay, let's just say, hypothetically, that all that happens. It's a lot to imagine at the moment, but reputable journalists are talking about it. That doesn't actually heal any of what you and Mati and I were so worried about a couple of years ago. It doesn't heal any of the internal divisiveness, the hatred between religious and secular in too many places, the absolute disgust on the part of the secular and the religious with the Haredi population legislation that has refused to serve and continues to refuse to serve, a deep divide in this country over the judiciary, a deep divide in this country over marauding gangs in Judea and Samaria on the West Bank, which were at one point, and I use these quotes very ironically, only attacking Palestinians, but most recently now have attacked the IDF and burned IDF trucks, and no government, left, right or center has ever been willing to put their foot down and put a stop to that.It's a country with housing costs that make young people wonder if they should stay. I mean, we could go on and on and on. But after all of the successes of Iran and Lebanon and maybe peace with Saudi Arabia and Syria and some quiet with Gaza, all of that happens. We're a hurting place, and we're a broken place. I think a lot of people outside this country don't think about in those ways, but we are. And you're the person whose soul most speaks to me. I really want to hear from you, what needs to happen over the next one to five years? And under whom, not necessarily the name of that person, but what a person. So that as we're in the last chapter of our careers and the last few chapters of our lives, thank God, We've had long, good, productive lives, but we're not going to be around forever. And we want to know when we get called on high that we're leaving for our children and our grandchildren, something that we're proud of and that's sustainable. What do you think has to happen in the next few years for that to be the case?Danny, first of all, my sense is that we're not yet in the phase of PTSD because we're still experiencing the trauma itself, the hostages. As long as the hostages aren't in home, it's still October 7th in some way because it's still October 7th for them. The uncertainty of even whether the war with Iran will resume, and it can resume any day. We may discover something essential about the nuclear program that we missed, and now we have a chance to get to it. We're still living the actual events, which makes it really hard for us to think clearly about the morning after. But my sense of where we'll be when we do leave the trauma phase and enter the PTSD phase is that we will be faced with a very stark choice. The choice is between October 6th and October 8th. October 6th, of course, is the metaphor for the year leading up to October 7th, when we were being torn apart by a government that deliberately incited one part of the nation against the other and saw its political strength as coming from activating its base against other fellow Israelis, fellow Jews. October 8th was the extraordinary pivot from the lowest point of our schism in our history, which is really saying something, to one of the peak moments of Israeli unity.I actually think that it was the most extraordinary achievement of national unity in our history, precisely because we were coming from schism. Now, you and I remember May and June 1967, and we remember the powerful sense of unity that swept not only Israel, but the entire diaspora. We've had other moments of extraordinary unity. 1973, the Yom Kippur War, the Antebe rescue, the rescue of the Ethiopian Jews. But I really do think that this was our greatest achievement because it was so unexpected. It was so unlikely. If you had asked me on October 6th, do you think there's anything that could ever pull us back together again in the way that we were, say, in May 1967, I don't think I would have said yes. We surprised ourselves with our ability to re-inhabit the instincts of peoplehood. Of course, it didn't last, and it can't last. Those peak experiences never last, and you do have to go back to some routine. But one of the reasons that it didn't last is because this government reverted to form. The DNA of this coalition is hatred of internal enemies. My colleague at the Hartman Institute, Tal Becker, has noted the difference between nationalism and ultra-nationalism.Nationalism seeks to unite a people against an external enemy. Enemy, ultra-nationalism seeks to unite its base against a perceived internal enemy. We have an ultra-nationalist government. The tragedy of the Likud is that it was once a Nationalist Party, and it became an ultra-nationalist party. When I think about what needs to heal, it brings me back to our Prime Minister. It's hard to single out the worst offense of Netanyahu against the State of Israel. But maybe, for me, maybe his most serious offense was dividing the mainstream Zionist Israeli majority and tearing it apart and turning it against itself. The reason why I think this was so serious is because what you have in Israel are, on either side of the spectrum, on one side, you have Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, who reject Israel as a democratic state and want Israel to just be a Jewish state, of course, in their image. On the other side of the spectrum, you have the Arab population that rejects Israel as a Jewish state and wants Israel only to be a secular democracy. These are the two fastest-growing segments of the Israeli population. Between the two of them, they're close to 35% of the population, which means that close to 35% is not Zionist or anti-Zionist or rejects the Zionist ethos of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.It is the mainstream, that 65%, 70% of Israel, that holds us together without a relatively unified mainstream. Of course, the mainstream is always divided, but it was not divided on the foundational principles of how we understand Israel. That's what this government did. It tore apart the mainstream and turned it against itself. In some ways, our most bitter divide became the Jewish/democratic divide within the Zionist mainstream. This, for me, is an unforgivable crime against Israeliness and against our future. What has to heal here is the reconstruction of a mainstream Zionist majority united around minimally shared ideas of what we mean by Israel as a Jewish state and Israel as a democratic state.

There's so much to talk about with regard to all of this. We'll come back and do that in another conversation, I hope, many times. But you're saying that there are certain things that the Netanyahu government and Bibi Netanyahu at personam have done to divide this country, I think, for his own political purposes and for an array of other reasons. And some of that, as you said, is really an unforgivable crime against the state of Israel and a sin against the Jewish people. I don't want to get into this political figure or that political name, but as somebody who worries deeply about this country and yet whose soul is bound up with the bond of this country's future, do you see the kinds of energies and people on the political horizon that you hope that in a few years we can begin to embark on a deep healing process? Or do you think we're still waiting to see if and when and whether that can bubble to the surface?Well, what we do see, and this is an essential precondition for the healing of Israel, is a very strong longing among Israelis to transcend the divisiveness. And that's expressed for me in every poll that has been released by a credible organization since October 7th, and that shows a consistent victory for the opposition, sometimes overwhelmingly, sometimes a smaller majority, but in no poll that I've seen. Again, aside from channel 14, which is the Netanyahu propaganda mouthpiece, every single poll consistently shows that this government of divisiveness will lose. And I think that that's the main reason why people are so desperate for change. We need a government that will work to try to bring us together. And look, we had such a government. We had that government before this coalition took over, and it was an extraordinary coalition of right, left, and center, and even of Arab and Jewish parties the first time in the country's history. And so the old Benet coalition succeeded in modeling the diversity of Israel in a way, in the opposite way, that the Netanyahu coalition. The Netanyahu coalition was the most homogeneous government in Israel's history. It went right, more right, and farthest right.And we never had a right-wing government like that. There was always a party, at least one party, in the mix that was more centrist, that would be able to temper some of the ideological leanings. And that was true as well on the left. And so this is the worst government in Israel's history precisely because it is the least pluralistic, politically, ideologically. I certainly see forces within the political system, not to mention names, but Naftali Benet. What I appreciate about Benet is that he's right wing and pluralist at the same time. This, post October 7th, especially, this is a right-wing country. And the next government is going to be led one way or another by a right-wing politician. The question is, which one? Is it going to be a politician who sees anyone who's outside of their coalition as an enemy? Or is it going to be a right-wing politician who sees his most important job as not implementing an ideological agenda, but healing Israel? And we do have such figures. So I'm very hopeful for the morning after. I'm less hopeful that the morning after is imminent. We could be in a really prolonged, agonizing, slow death of this divisive coalition.But the healing, God willing, will come. I believe in Israel. I believe in the Jewish people, and it will come. At the same time, I know that this government has already done tremendous damage to Israel. I worry about lasting systemic damage to the civil service, to the Israeli ethos, to what we call the dignity of the state, the political system's ability and willingness to uphold the the dignity of the state, which was once really what united Likud and labor was a commitment to this. That's the other sin of this government, the other sin among many.Among many, right.I believe that a strong majority of Israelis want to see the restoration of some basic semblance of social coherence and want to see the restoration of the dignity of the state. And so for those reasons, I guess that makes me an optimist.It does make you an optimist. I think you're an optimist in your very soul, in your very core. And I think that it's your love of Israel and your DNA-based optimism that have, quite rightly, made you one of the most beloved and revered figures commenting on Israel and the soul of the Israeli people for many, many, many years.Well, thank you. And you certainly fit that description. I'm deeply grateful to you.But I'm grateful to you for your time today, for sharing with us in this really historic moment, your thoughts about what we've just accomplished, what we still have to accomplish, where the future might lead. Once again, to my friend and teacher, Yossi Klein Halevi, my deepest, deepest thanks.

It’s very hard to describe what people are feeling.

To be sure, there’s a deep sense of pride, even awe, at what the Air Force and Mossad accomplished (though there’s now a bit of a public pissing match between the Air Force and Mossad as to who really gets the credit—it can be exhausting to live in a country run by adolescents). Twelve days of relentless pounding of Iran, a country we were deeply fearful of not long ago, and not a single plane lost? Not a single pilot in captivity? Flawless, day after day, night after night, bombing run after bombing run… It’s truly an operation that will be studied around the world, and we—along with the pilots who accomplished it—know that we watched history being made.

In the press, there’s a real sense that we’re still unpacking something history will long recall. Here’s but one of hundreds of examples, this one from Yedi’ot on Friday

The large headline: “The people who made history”

The smaller headline: “They practiced intensively for weeks, and thought through all the possible eventualities and their responses to them (including pilots taken captive), but “when would be the moment of truth, we didn’t know until that night.” ⚫️ The commander of Squadron 107, Lieutenant Colonel “A”, the navigator “N” [DG-the woman standing on the left] and munitions officer “Y” tell how one plans and carries out an operation that pilots have been imagining for decades, and what they felt flying over Iran. ⚫️ “The entire time, you’re thinking about your objectives,” said “N” as she described the feeling of being thousands of kilometers from Israel. “Only when we were on our way back and over non-threatening territory did I say to the pilot, “Wow, what in the world did we just experience?”

Given the tremendous pride and sense of accomplishment, one might expect this country to be euphoric. But it’s not—not even close.

We went out to dinner with dear friends (truly enjoyable except for the fact that it was an outside bar/restaurant, and we noticed about half way through dinner that without exception, the rest of the diners were about half our age, or less). We’d looked forward to our friends’ company, because we both felt so … unsettled. They’re smart and insightful, and I was sure they’d calm us down. But they, too, felt the same thing. No one knows quite what to feel, and the PTSD from all those hours in the shelters, and the horrible losses elsewhere in the country are all still very raw.

Still, though, the bar/restaurant was packed without an empty seat even outside—which also tells you something about this place.

It was similar at the Friday night dinner to which we were invited and at Shabbat lunch. Everyone was relieved—that no pilots were hurt, that we were at least largely successful—and, if we’re to be honest, that our children and grandchildren (who moved in because they don’t have safe rooms or bomb shelters) have finally moved out of our houses!!

One of our hosts old us, laughing, that the morning we all heard there was a cease fire, she announced to her kids and grandkids, “Checkout time is 4:00 pm.” Everyone laughed with her, but more than one person said, “Oh, our checkout time was much earlier than that.” It was fun to laugh, but beneath all the giggles (aided by copious amounts of alcohol), there’s still a deep sense of concern.

Why? Because there’s a ton we don’t know. What’s the real story with Fordow? What was destroyed, and what wasn’t? And why would we believe any of the characters opining?

What happened to those hundreds of kilos of enriched uranium that no one seems to be able to locate? Was it all destroyed? Buried? Do they have it? If they have it, can they make a bomb? If they could, would they at this point just go ahead and use it if they think the regime is going down?

And then, of course, despite the gratitude to Donald Trump for doing the right thing and for sending those B2’s our way (a few challot here and there actually reflected that gratitude—this one went super viral),

… those bizarre tweets about Bibi’s trial turned off everyone, left and right (except for Bibi). “What, have we become a vassal state now that he ostensibly saved our asses at Fordow? He’s going to attack not only the rule of law in his own country, but in ours, too?”

It’s a fair question—though the trial has, indeed, become a circus, and we’ll never, ever see a verdict. But that’s for us to fret about, not for Donald.

But maybe this is not what it seems. Might something be brewing?

Is this another “I’ll decide within the next two weeks,” when in fact he’d already decided? Is there some grand deal being cooked up in which the war in Gaza ends, the hostages come home, Syria and Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords, Israel gets partial sovereignty over parts of the West Bank (that’s the rumor), Arab countries take responsibility for Gaza while Hamas’ leadership is exiled to Africa (also part of the rumor), Bibi gets a pardon (hence Trump’s “less unglued than they appear” tweets) and then Trump gets the Nobel Peace Prize?

Here’s the front page on which Yisrael Hayom “announced” those elements and others (including the poll—see bottom left in blue) that 61% of Israelis want a rapid end to the war in Gaza).

There are lots of rumors along those lines, but each of those bullet points raises many more questions (will Bibi take a pardon if it means leaving politics? Who can really exercise leverage over Hamas at this point? and so forth), which we’ll unpack throughout this week.

For now, to start our week, we’re just going to peek into the world of Israeli social media, trying to share the ongoing deep and pervasive sense of un-ease, and the worry that wars of all sorts are far, far from over.

Israeli social media channels are flowing with videos that are largely humorous, but also serious in their own way, as well.

Here’s one made (ostensibly) by a kindergarten teacher (I don’t know who this person is), who shares how disappointed his young pupils were that the war has ended and commends the parents for having made the war so fun:

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Then were was a Facebook post which is supposed to be funny, or at least cute, but which also reflects the fact that the person in the video can’t really figure out why we’re not actually celebrating …

A few words of explanation:

* “Miri” is Miri Regev, our Minister of Transportation (among other portfolios), who has been the object of ridicule for flitting around the globe at our expense for months, but who when it came time to help stranded Israelis get home when the skies finally opened, proved even more incompetent than usual

* “Absolute victory” is reference to the promise that Netanyahu has been making about Gaza for 630+ days, while no such victory is anywhere in sight and seven soldiers were killed (burned alive in an APC so vulnerable that reservists refuse to get in them) just as the war with Iran was ending

* First Israel versus second Israel — the old elite versus non-elite issue that was hugely surfaced during the judicial reform catastrophe

What will it take to really heal this place? We’re going to hear from experts this week.

We shall see. But for now, that’s the only story that matters.

So today, taking a step away from the actual headlines, one of our regular glimpses at some of the comic moments in Israel (most intentional, but some not) in the midst of what is cleary a history-transforming week.

Bottom line, we’re tired. Most Israelis have been woken up time and again, night after night, every single night since Thursday. Yes, you can usually go back to sleep—unless your children, or grandchildren—go ballistic when you try to get them to sleep (again) at 3:00 a.m. But even if you do sleep, a good night’s sleep, it isn’t.

Hence this one:

“The People of Israel lives!! But is dying for some sleep...”

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The Lego video at the top of this post, repeated below, makes the most sense if you have seen the Israeli hit series, Teheran, and know its memorable theme music. (If you haven’t seen the series, it’s excellent and well worth it.)

To refresh memory, here are a few seconds of the main musical theme:

Now, you get more clearly the pun behind the little AI-generated Lego-action-figures war. Most of it’s obvious, but in case you didn’t pick it up …

00:22 is based on the now famous Mossad-released video of the two Mossad agents operating well inside Iran

00:29 The Mossad, as is now well known, built an entire drone base inside Iran so that at the right moment, Israel already had airborne armaments inside the Islamic Republic.

00:32 Israeli news, night after night, shows us launchers being destroyed as seen through the camera of the warhead about to destroy them. The grainy pictures that always end in static (because the cameras blow up) are now a ubiquitous theme of the news. They’re incredibly repetitive and fascinating at the same time.

Kind of crazy what an individual at home (no idea who it was) can do with AI these days.

Mossad jokes are not a major category in Israeli humor, at least to my knowledge. But these are not regular times. Hence this, for example:

The news, as mentioned above, is under pressure to keep it interesting, day after day, night after night, while broadcasting constantly. Some of it’s interesting, a bit of it repetitive, and a very small portion nonsensical.

This clip, produced by the Israeli comedian Udi Kagan, appeared here on Twitter. (We did not prepare the subtitles; the clip already had them.)

If you don’t watch the Hebrew Israeli news, not all the references will be clear, so here’s a quick guide:

00:53 — On Israeli live TV, as missile warnings come in, the names of the towns and cities where residents have to enter safe rooms appears in an orange list on the right. Typically, the list grows and grows. But because the orders to enter the safe room are often cancelled almost as soon as they’re issued (either because the IDF shot the missile down, or its route has been recalculated), this disappearing orange list makes fun of the seemingly fickle decision-making. (Obviously, the Home Front Command is doing its very best under very trying circumstances.)

00:58 — the Israeli news loves to bring on former military commanders as commentators. Many of them are excellent. But at times, they, too, are at a loss for something to say (or are trying not to say what they’re not supposed to say), and what emerges verges on the incomprehensible. Thus, this portion with “Dr. Aminadav Finger.”

01:21 — no nightly news would be complete without a journalist in a public shelter telling us viewers how the people there are coping. But the shelters are hardened steel and cement structures, so the signal there is often weak. The broadcast from the shelter’s breaking up is kind of par for the course, leading many Israelis to ask why they’re even trying.

01:46 — During the Israeli news, when they cut for an ad break, they actually tell you how many ads there will be. What this video doesn’t capture is that many of the channels (12, in particular) have a timer on the top left corner with a countdown, so you know how long your coffee or bathroom break can be before you start missing news.

01:50 — Even the ads are different these days, stressing how though we’re all different, we’re in this together. Few of the ads, obviously, are this transparent. But still …

Every now and then, a live interview does not go the way the interviewer had planned. One such instance, which immediately went viral went it was posted on social media, was this VERY REAL Channel 13 interview with a man who had survived the missile near his building, but who gave the interviewer a bit too much information about why.

You can hear the interviewer trying to cut the interview short, but the “damage” was done. Minimal damage, obviously, and thousands of laughs …

Bibi is obviously hugely popular during this war, which for now is enjoying almost wall to wall support. That does not mean that everyone loves everything about him — quite the contrary. The war is thus still giving people plenty of material for taking shots at the Prime Minister (who is now likely, one would have to guess, to be Prime Minister for a very, very long time):

“In Iran they are saying that Netanyahu will pay for this. They apparently don’t know him.”

And as for Avner Netanyahu’s wedding this past Monday night — a wedding that was obviously cancelled (we posted about the controversy surrounding the wedding last week) — a little wedding-related dig at Sarah:

“In short, Sarah didn’t dig the girl”

Below is a screenshot of part of the post, and below the screenshot, an AI-generated translation of the rather long post.

A few brief comments on the FB post, below.

I was killed on the 120th day of the war, but I didn’t tell anyone.The battles were raging and I didn’t want to hurt the guys’ morale.At the end of the month, I got leave.My wife Talia picked me up from the train and hugged me tight, as if she were drowning in a frozen sea and I was a wooden door. So of course I didn’t tell her I was dead; everything had already fallen on her shoulders these past months.The moment I entered the apartment, Romi, my four-year-old daughter, came running from the neighbors, jumped on me and refused to let go—so I didn’t tell her either that Daddy was dead. Why break her heart?After Romi fell asleep, Talia waited for me in bed with white wine.“I missed you,” she wrapped her warm thighs around my cold body.We made love.Not because I wanted to (the dead don’t need sex), but just to make her happy.It didn’t work; she stayed distant (or was it me?), and when she asked what I’d been through—I stayed silent (no reason to bring horrors into bed).A few days later I went back to the battlefield, and two weeks after that I saved five soldiers from death.“You’ve got balls of steel!” the battalion commander slapped my back.I wanted to say I was dead, so I hadn’t really risked anything, but since my actions had revived the unit’s spirit, which still hadn’t recovered from the death of Gilad the platoon commander, I replied, “Thank you, sir.”At some point I was sent home, back to “normal life,”but between me and it stood a transparent, impassable border,behind which I watched them like a fish in an aquarium.And the world that once excited me—turned faded;work at the computer store no longer interested me,nor did poker games with friends,and at home, with Talia and Romi, I felt like an invading germ.Until…One Saturday, Romi fell in the living room. “Daddyyyy!” she cried and I froze, hypnotized by the sight of blood trickling down her forehead, the clear tears dripping from her eyes, the yellowish urine that escaped her, and I thought about how many shades of fluid are in the human body, and remembered Sergei and the bullet he took to the head.That night, after we got back from the ER, Talia said I had to get help, that she couldn’t reach me, that she was out of strength…But all I heard was blah-blah from someone who doesn’t understand how the world works and how bloody and stinking and monstrous it is.Better she doesn’t know.Let her put on an avocado mask and go to sleep.But she kept nagging, so I went to the living room and stared at the sidewalk, seven floors down, and wanted to jump, because I felt like a foreign body that life had rejected.The window wouldn’t open.Turns out the frame was bent by a rocket that fell nearby.So I gave up and went to bed.The next day, Assi, who’d been with me in high school and in the unit, came into the store. Since it was already noon, we went to the hummus place, gossiping about Victor who learned to jump with his new leg, about Barry who got a better hand than the one he lost, and about Udi who finally proposed.At some point, there was silence and I asked if Talia had asked him to come talk to me.Assi nodded, because there’s no b******t between us.“So why is she worried?” he asked.“It’s hard for her to accept that I’m dead,” I answered honestly, because I no longer had the strength to hide it.Assi wasn’t fazed and speared a pickle from the plate. “Remember when you died?”“The day Sergei was shot.”“Mmm… half a year.” He bit into the pickle. “And what’s the hardest part about being dead?”“That I don’t feel anything.”“Really?” He looked at me, picked up a fork and stabbed my hand.“Ow!” I jumped, “Are you nuts?!”“Turns out there are some things you do feel,” he grinned, like a kid who just egged the principal.I glared at him. Really? Seriously?! That’s your reaction to my death?! Seven years of psychology studies for this?! I got so angry I threw an olive at his eye.“You son of a—” he flung pita at me.So I threw a shish kebab at him.A wave of stupid laughter took over and we kept pelting each other with fries and falafel until the owner lost it and kicked us out.“What if…” Assi wondered as we walked back to the store, “it’s not that you don’t feel, but that… you’re afraid to feel?”“Afraid to feel what?” I asked, and immediately thought of Ortal, Sergei’s wife, who after years of fertility treatments finally got pregnant, and how he came back from leave beaming and showed us the ultrasound of the boy. “Check out this mega-penis! Just like his dad!!!”48 hours later, he took a sniper’s bullet.A bullet that wasn’t even meant for him.I was supposed to go to the window,but I was breaking a record on a dusty Game Boy I’d found,so I asked him to go instead and…I started to cry, because he didn’t deserve it. He didn’t.“Now I know you’re alive,” Assi said, “Know why?”“Why?”“Because dead men don’t cry.”He put a comforting hand on me and suddenly there was wild gunfire,fighter jets tearing through the sky, which stank of smoke, of decay,someone cried “Yama! Yama!!”Or maybe it was “Mama! Mama!!”And my hands searched for a weapon, but I was in civilian clothes, in the middle of Bialik Boulevard—“I’m losing my mind,” I told Assi.“You’re not, bro! You’re feeling, don’t run from it, don’t run!” And he hugged me tight and didn’t let me fall.

That evening I went to Talia, who was folding clothes, and said I wanted, like before, to read Romi a bedtime story.“Not sure that’s a good idea,” she refused to look at me.So I pinched her butt, like we used to do to annoy each other when we were dating.It surprised her, even confused her.“Assi came to visit me at the store,” I said.“And…” she glanced at me.“He stabbed me with a fork.”“Too bad it wasn’t a pitchfork,” she looked at me for a few seconds and must have seen something that changed her mind, because she picked up a book from the couch and handed it to me.I read Romi a story about a turtle who wanted to be a butterfly, and the night lamp painted colorful animals on the walls.She fell asleep before the end, where the turtle, drawn in black and white the whole book, suddenly glowed with colors.And even though it was a predictable and silly ending, I teared up, and stroked her tiny, sweet fingers, moving with the rhythm of her dreams, and I couldn’t understand how in the same world horror and love could live side by side.And I thought of Sergei, of his wife, of the baby in her belly, of corpses and kisses, screams and butterflies, and everything inside me stormed and raged and cried… and I didn’t run from it… I didn’t run. I didn’t run.

There are thousands, probably many thousands, of the “living dead” walking around this country. Some will be OK eventually. Some will not. But I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know someone who — at least for now — is the walking dead.

With that in mind, one can appreciate why the plans for Avner Netanyahu’s opulent wedding next Monday have caused some consternation in some quarters.

More on that below.

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Bibi Netanyahu’s son, Avner, is getting married next Monday evening. Mazal tov. By all accounts (and I know a few people who know him fairly well), Avner is a lovely guy. He stays completely below the radar. Unlike his exiled brother who now resides in Miami at Israeli taxpayer expense (security and the like), Avner never makes political comments and doesn’t live on the public dole.

He’s just a decent guy with a complicated family (which includes his half-sister, Noa, who is totally estranged from the PM father).

But because this is a country soaked in pain (hence the combining of these two social media posts, the one above and this one), even this wedding has become controversial, as have the protests that are planned. One of the participants in the conversation below posted the clip on his X feed, so we added subtitles for our readers.

I’m not taking a stand on either the wedding or the protests. We’re just sharing this clip to give a sense of how almost everything in this country relates back to the heartbreak that lurks around every corner, to the heartbreak that is going to shape the soul of this nation for as long as anyone reading these words is alive.

What happens on the battlefield, what will transpire with Iran, what we do about the Houthis, when there will be elections — all of those matter a great deal.

But none of those things will heal the soul of this hurting place. And that, more than anything, is what one has to understand to appreciate what this home that we love so deeply has become, what its leaders will eventually have to address so it can begin, some day, to heal.

Headlines like the one below about a soldier seriously wounded are tragically not unusual in the Israeli press, either in Hebrew or any other language. Though IDF statistics on wounded soldiers are not updated consistently, the IDF has said that approximately 10,000 soldiers have been wounded in the war, about 1,000 new cases are opened each month (that number has likely dropped in recent months) and that somewhere around 750 have been seriously wounded.

The family of one seriously wounded soldier (NOT the soldier references in the TOI screenshot above) posted a video of their son, Niko, being visited by the new IDF Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, whose appointment took effect a couple of months ago. The family wanted the video spread so that people will have a sense of the profundity of some of these grievous wounds, and the critical roles that families play in being their sons’ and daughters’ voices.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

And then there are stories that are much more heartwarming. The following story came out this pasts weekend in Yedi’ot Achronot, and was timed to coincide with the holiday of Shavu’ot, which we just celebrated this past week, because the story of the book of Ruth is the story of someone joining the Jewish people.

The headline reads צו גיור“Tzav Giyur” (An Order to Convert) which is a play on the real phrase, צו גיוס “Tzav Giyus” (A Draft Order).

The sub-headline, in the middle-sized print, reads:

In the shadow of this war, increasing numbers of non-Jews who live in Israel are seeking to become part of the Jewish people — many of them combat soldiers in the IDF who have been in battle. ⚫️ Michael, who was wounded as a reservist: “When the war started, I asked the [rabbinic] conversion court to speed up the process. I wrote them that I was in Gaza, and that if God forbid something were to happen to me, I want to die as a Jew.”

In the text of the article, Rabbi Seth Farber, who has appeared on our podcast several times on a variety of subjects, and who heads the organization Itim, which among other issues, helps people navigate the world of the rabbinate, often with regard to conversion, says, “In our conversion court, we’ve seen during the war a rise of 50% in the numbers of people who wish to convert. People wish to be part of the story of the Jewish people.”

The war is changing lives and families in ways that are far from the headlines that most of us see. Some are heartbreaking, but in some cases that are too important to overlook, there is also cause for pride — and for hope.

Since we dove into the world of politics and political figures with yesterday’s post, it seemed appropriate today to share two quick videos that have made their way across Israeli social media—worth sharing because they make clear how difficult it is going to be for anyone—old or new—to get their ideas heard by those who don’t already agree with them.

Israelis have a host of issues to address, with no obvious solutions. So one might think that in the face of our plummeting international standing, increasingly wide-spread international consensus that the IDF has committed at least some war crimes and utterly ineffectual Israeli response to those accusations, the fact that we can’t stop the Houthis from firing at us (we have to stop every missile, while they just have to get one through with a serious hit) and host of other challenges, people would be interested in hearing new ideas.

But that’s not how tribal identity works.

If' you’re on the right, then anyone who’s left of Bibi is a disgrace and a danger to the Jewish state. How much the more-so if that “someone” is Yair Golan, who recently made that horribly foolish comment about the IDF killing babies as a hobby.

So Golan was at a conference in Sderot, a conference the purpose of which was specifically to bring together different voices, and as you can see, he got nowhere.

I’m not sure that telling the crowd how brave he is, how much he loves them when it was pretty obvious that he didn’t, etc., was a smart move, but his chances in elections (whenever they happen) were pretty bleak anyway. Still, his words to the crowd and their attitude to him reveals a great deal about Israeli political life.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

But it’s not only crowds on the right responding that way to figures on the left. Below (from which the small snippet at the very top of this post is taken), we see a left crowd at the Katznelson Forum, refusing to let Benny Gantz speak. The catcalls at the beginning accuse him of having agreed to sit with Netanyahu in a government, which he in fact did. To the left, that makes him a disgrace, and no less a threat to the nation than the right thinks Yair Golan is.

Here, at greater length than the snippet above, another glimpse into an Israeli conference (remember, it was a conference, not a political rally).

What will it take for Israelis to start listening to those for whom they didn’t or wouldn’t vote? Will it take a crisis of gargantuan proportions (Iran readied with a bomb, the EU not allowing Israeli passports to enter, or worse…), or would that just lead to even more public bloodletting?

It’s hard to know. But clearly, a nation facing existential challenges is not even close to having the conversations it desperately needs.

Is there a person in the wings with the ability to change that culture, or at least to shift it? That may very well be one of the most important questions that will shape Israel’s future.

A few items about people we’ve had the privilege of hearing from in previous episodes of the Israel from the Inside podcast:

* In February, we heard from Dr. Ran Baratz on how the IDF needs to completely rebuild itself because it made the mistake of trying to become a “post modern” army. On Tuesday, I was very saddened to read this Facebook post from Dr. Baratz:

So much pain. Omer Van Gelder, the combat soldier and commander from the Givati Brigade, one of the three who just fell in Gaza, is the partner of my beloved daughter. Omer was the salt of the earth. A rare personality. Every encounter with him was filled with abundant goodness and joy, and brought endless happiness and love to the family. We all fell in love with him from the very first moment. Our hearts are broken.

The funeral is today at 16:00 on Mount Herzl.

Our hearts go out to the Baratz and Van Gelder families on this horrific loss.

* Yesterday, we heard from David Sherez, who along with some colleagues, is founding a new political party known as “El Ha-Degel,” or To the Flag. We’ve already heard from a number of people interested in learning more about David and the work of El Ha-Degel, so here are some links:

* The website of the El HaDegel party

* El Ha-Degel on LinkedIn

* A link to follow El Ha-Degel on various platforms and to hear about events

These aren’t simple times in Israel. The war has turned into a slog, soldiers keep dying (yesterday morning we learned of three more) and it’s not entirely clear (at least to those of us not privy to inside conversations) what the real goal is. Very few people here believe that the goal is to free the hostages. After all, the choices we’re giving Hamas are (1) release hostages and then we’re going to kill all of you, or (2) if you don’t release the hostages, we’re going to kill all of you. Not that hard to figure out why there isn’t a deal.

The United States and Iran might sign a deal that is bad for Israel. Israel is becoming a pariah state across Europe (France, the UK, Germany and more) and beyond (Canada, too), and even with the White House, things are tense. The issue of the Haredi draft has yet to explode but might do just that very soon, and the list goes on.

If you are thirty years old in this country, then you have —with the exception of a year and a bit of the Bennett-Lapid government — no real memory after your childhood of any PM other than Bibi Netanyahu. Even many of those who generally support his policies agree that that’s simply nuts. It’s time to have new leadership, time to stop recycling the names that have been in the paper for years and years and years.

Today, we meet David Sherez, who along with others, is one answer to perhaps the most common question our readers ask me: “When is there going to be new leadership.” El Ha-Degel, “To the Flag,” aims to offer the Israeli voter a new choice, and today, we hear why, how and when.

David Sherez grew up in Tel Aviv and served in Sayeret Matkal (Israel’s most elite commando unit) as a combat soldier and commander. He holds a B.A degree in economics from the Hebrew University and, alongside his studies, founded the "Aniyata" Beit Midrash for Torah and Economics studies, with the participation of Haredi students.

He is one of the founders of the social high-tech and real estate company Venn. David joined Matan Yaffe in establishing the "Komzitz" association and the Haredi-Zionist organization "Achvat Torah." David participated in establishing the "Tikun 2024" organization and, together with his colleagues in the movement's leadership, founded the "El HaDegel" movement. He is active in the economic-political field and formulates economic action plans for the State of Israel together with experts and senior figures in the economy.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

I think one of the most common questions that I get in response to articles that we post, videos that we post, interviews that we do, almost everything that we put up, one of the most common questions is, where are the new names? Where are the new faces? How come Israel recycles, but not for the environment? Israel seems to recycle the same political personalities, not only year after year, but decade after decade. A lot of the people who are now going to run for Prime Minister in 2026 have been around for for a very, very, very long time. People want to know, are there any new faces, new ideas, new parties, new anything coming into the system? The answer to that is yes. We're going to hear today from someone who is leading one of the major initiatives to bring new life, new blood, new oxygen, new ideas to the Israeli political system. His name is David Sherez. There's a full biography in the notes for today, and you will get a bit of a sense of what he's all about from the small video that we have put up that El Hadegel, his group, To the Flag or Towards the Flag, produced. But we're just going to go right in and dive in. So David, I know that you are literally all day long running from place to place to place, and you just came from where you were talking to people and you're doing meetings at homes and whatever. So I want to talk about the project in a second, but first I want to hear about you. Who's David Sherez? How did you grow up? What did you do? What in your life made you decide that Israel needed this now and that you were one of the people that needed to make this happen?Okay. So thank you for hosting me here. My name is David Sherez. I grew up in Tel Aviv, was born here, a very Zionist family. My father came from Argentina. My mother came from France. In many aspects, it's like a family that came in the initiation of Israel. People who came from a religious home, came from very strong Zionist emotions, loving Israel, connected to the Jewish roots, and not in a religious way. I had the privilege to grow up in such a home, very different from other homes in Tel Aviv in the '90s. I was very active from childhood growing on the concepts of leaving something better than what I received. That was what my father taught me. That was what I did in the scouts. And later on, when I joined the Sayeret MatkalSayeret Matkal is Israel's basically most elite Commando Unit.Yes. Actually, I joined Sayeret Matkal after my scouts guy told me, you need to go there. Later on, unfortunately, he lost his life. He was a soldier in Duvdevan in the army, and his memory still lives in me. I feel that, I was 11 years serving in Sayeret Matkal, I was a commander. I was leading the special missions of the unit. I feel very proud of doing it. Very challenging, amazing people, and serving Israel for the best. When did you get out of the army?2014.So 10 years ago-ish.Yeah, about 10 years ago. Still with the same vision of making Israel an amazing place for the Jewish people and for everyone that lives here, I established a company, a startup, together with two friends that were with me in the team in the army.That's very common. People should know a lot about guys who are together in the army. They leave and then do startups together. It's a very common phenomenon.That's true.What did this startup do?The concept was to transform neighborhoods and cities into a vibrant community like a kibbutz, connecting real estate, technology, and community. We are now managing 200,000 units in the US, increasing NOI, but actually majorly increasing the experience of life and participation in the community. And it's amazing. Of course, we also we started in Israel. I was the CEO and later on the chairman. It's a successful company, and it was my gate to the business world. So the recent decade was a lot of business and a lot of also do good. I had the privilege to be partner of rabbi Leybel, David Leybel, Haredi rabbi, and establishing a huge movement in the ultra-Orthodox community that is actually inviting Haredim to join Israel, to do aliyah from Bnei Brak and Measharim, and to understand that they can both be Haredi and get education, work, serve in the army, and everything. I think This is part of what Israel needs now, and this is part of also the vision that is driving me in everything that I do in life. In Kabbalah, it is called the unification of the poles. I think this is the the great answer of our generation, the ability to merge the two powers, the two energies that we have in our people, in the Jewish people. One is a very universal voice connected to the world, understanding what is happening around us, being part of it and respecting it. And the other one is being very connected to our roots and getting the answers from the beginning, the origin of the Jewish people, from the morality, from the knowledge, from the wisdom that we carry, not necessarily in in a religious way. I think this is the answer of Zionism. This is the answer of what Israel could be for the Jewish people and also for the world, the first post-polarized country. I hope we will become one. But actually, now we are not there. That was my last decade, and then October 7th came. A very good friend of mine sent me a message on the morning of October 7th. He's from Kibbutz Beeri, Shahar Tzemach, z"l. He was in the Kitat Konanut, in the defense force of the Kibbutz, and he lost his life there, leaving a wife and two children. This was my entry point to the war. I serve as a reservist in Sayeret Matkal, serving more than 300 days in this war. Actually, tomorrow, I'm going back to Miluim to Reserve duty. I think something really strong happened to me and to many people, actually, from October 7th.What was that? Because we heard, by the way, a lot of people who went in and spent, I mean, 300 days is a tremendous amount. There's other people that have done 300 days. It's not unusual, but it's a huge amount of time. But we heard a lot of people come out, whether they'd been in for a month or two months or six months or a year. And they all said, We're never going back to the discourse of October 6th. That was the famous line, we're not going back to the way we spoke about each other and to each other on October 6th. Everything on the seventh. People came out of Gaza, and they said, and from the north, and they said, That's it. We're going to do something here. Your generation, people in their 30s, early 40s. But people said, Now we're going to do something different. As you're in, you're serving 300 days, which is an unbelievably long period of time. In a commander unit like Sayeret Matkal, we're not talking about sitting around. You were doing very real things, obviously. Something clicked for you. What was it that clicked for you?I remember the first time you cross the fence to the enemy side, your heart is beating very hard, you're sweating, and you're thinking about very basic things. Why are we here? What am I fighting for? And I think that I was walking with these questions for many, many days. And I think the answer for this question is part of the answer of Israel today, which is, you have to answer why we are here. We are here because this is our home. We are here because our people started the culture, the language, everything started here. We are here not because of the UN and not because of the Holocaust, also because of that. But actually, we are here because there is a greater purpose for being here. And it's not to fight all day, and it's not to kill everyone, and not to fight among ourselves, but actually to understand that there is a higher purpose, and to do it, and to work together towards that purpose. And this was my understanding. And coming back from the war, fighting with people that a week before could fight on social media because one is supporting Bibi and the other is against Bibi, and hating each other and thinking that you are destroying Israel, but actually fighting together in this war, in a very just war, I feel, understanding that we are actually brothers and we can collaborate, and there is something to unite us, which is not the artificial unification, Oh, let's be all brothers and let's get along. It's not the lovey-dovey one, but actually, it's a very deep one that is uniting us around a goal, a higher goal that is actually the basic goal of Israel, to be a safe and prosperous home for the Jewish people. I would add to all the people that are living here. This is our goal. It's not the greater land of Israel. It's also not an extreme liberal, even progressive vision of unity for everyone. It's something different. This goal is actually what can unite us. The other goals are what is separating us, creating the very hard polarization of the Israeli society. And I think this was the understanding. And with this energy, we came back and we started to talk to people and telling them, look, this is what we need. We came to the politician and told them, work together now, finish this war, and don't let the people fight again about how we're going to investigate October 7th or about giving the mandate back to the people because after such a disaster, this is what needed to be done. And instead of it, they are letting us fight each other and actually burning more and more. And this fight is actually making us weak, hating each other. This is not the hope for Israel. And so after talking to all the politicians, after meeting tens of thousands of Israelis, when they stood, first of all, that the current politicians, they are with some a disease, like a political disease that is making them thinking about only the political interest, the camp, either you're on the side of Bibi or not, and actually not thinking about what is best for Israel and willing to pay the price for that and willing to collaborate with other sides in order to get there. And meeting Israelis that actually they lifted themselves to the situation and they did what was needed. They were called to the flag like we felt we were called to the flag to Gaza and Lebanon and other places. So the people of Israel were called to the flag, but actually the politician didn't. And a lot of people told us, we want you. We were waiting for you for many, many years. You are the generation that needs to come. And we were not thinking originally to go to become politicians. Actually, we hated it because it seems terrible. And we were not in high school, managing the students and everything. It wasn't our plan. We were entrepreneurs. We were leading people in the war. We were managing things. But when I understood that there is a strong calling here. As we heard the calling on October 7th, we heard the calling again, that our generation needs to enter the political sphere.There's a video that we put up. It's cute, but it's much more than cute. It's cute, but it carries a really big punch. There's these young people, your generation, who take a guy who's obviously Ben Gurion, and they take him to a river and whatever. People have seen the video. You talk about there about the decline It's a very short video, but you talk about the, the decline of the state. Give me briefly a diagnosis in your mind. What's gone wrong here? Writ large, 30,000 feet. What's happened here?For From the bird's view, around the end of the '60s, after the Six Days War, what happened is that actually the political system left the origin, the basic Zionist idea, and instead of it, adopted ideas that are external to Zionism. If Zionism is a very pragmatic, even a radical pragmatic approach to to how to make Israel a safe and prosperous home for the Jewish people, then the greater land of Israel, or liberal tending towards progressive ideas, are actually not part of it. That's one thing. The second thing is that the political interest became stronger than everything. You had two camps, the right and the left, that actually had ideas and ideologies that were not only unsuccessful, but actually created damage for Israel. Because let's take the left side. The concept of two-state solution. I think it was a good concept to try. But you cannot ignore the fact that the Palestinians or the concept of the Palestinians that is diminishing the existence of Israel. Before they want a state for themselves, they don't want us to be here. And I feel this This is something that we need to acknowledge. I'm not talking about a certain Palestinian or the other. I'm talking as a nation. That's one thing. If you believe that if there will be no two-state solution, there will be no Israel, then on a negotiation level, you're playing to their hands, totally. That's one thing. The other thing is that the right became so extreme, becoming more and more extreme.In what way?In a couple of ways. First of all, being so populist and saying, We're going to take all the land. We're going to kick out all the Palestinians. We're going to ignore the international community. We're going to do whatever we want. We're going to become more and more religious. We're going to ignore the fact that half of Israel are secular, liberal, that want to live differently. Thinking that this could work, this could create a sustainable, strong, prosperous home, no. Also, a lot criticism about the right is that they are talking a lot and raising the stakes all the time, but actually, they are not doing it. They are not doing it not only because someone is preventing them. They have the deep state that is preventing, they have the Supreme Court that is preventing. A lot of excuses, I think. But eventually, eventually, they are the ones that are not doing it because they understand that this is not practical. This is not possible for Israel to go on that route and still stay connected to the international community, to stay safe, to stay with a strong economy. Israel must have a strong economy. If we want the best education and the brains are, that's our core. And if we want to have a very strong army, we need a very strong economy as well. So it goes together and you need to be very pragmatic here. And the thing is that in general, the politics became so polarized that Zionists from the left and Zionists from the right are unable to collaborate. They boycott each other. It creates a situation where Zionist party is collaborating with a non-Zionist party in order to overcome the other Zionist party.The non-Zionist party is between the Arabs on the left and the Haredi on the right.At the end, we are losing. They are fighting about the relationship between the justice system and the Knesset and everything, the parliament, but eventually not changing anything. They are fighting about recruiting everyone, the Haredi and actually the others as well, but they are not recruiting anyone eventually. They're talking about the economy, but they are not doing anything. They live from fighting, from hating, from this, from breaking the basic connection of the Israeli society. I think this is what is broken here. No one is representing the interests of Israel in the politics and willing to pay the price and coming for a short period of time, doing what is needed, serving the people, and then giving the torch to the next one that will come. Because when you stay too much time in power, you become rotten. That's the thing.I want to come to El Hadegel in a second, the group that you and your colleagues have started, and you'll explain to us what it is, and you'll explain to us what it isn't, because that's also important for you to express. But before we get there, somebody might say, part of the problem is the system. In other words, yes, there's a lot of terrible stuff going on on the left. There's a lot of terrible stuff going on on the right. And as you put it, there's the left wing Zionists and the right wing Zionists can't talk to each other when you have, by the way, 40 % of the population of the state that is explicitly and unabashedly non-Zionist. The Arabs, understandably, are non-Zionist. The Haredim are essentially non-Zionists, and they together make up 40 % of the country. So the other 60 % cannot afford to be fighting with each other. But some people might say, But look, part of this is the system, leaving aside term limits, which I think most Israelis would agree we desperately need, although you have to find the Prime Minister who's willing to institute that while she or he is actually in office. But they would say there's no local representation. The nature of how the Knesset is built is always going to be people trying to undo coalitions. I'd say the system is broken in terms of the rules of the game. Do you buy that?I can agree that there is a problem in the system, and I think that there are changes that needs to be done. We are working on that as well.Can you give us some bullet of what you think we should change? Constitution?It's a minor thing like that.We live in a time where the norm and the rule stick together. There is no higher norm. So everything is actually examined by is it legal or not? But actually, there are a lot of things that are above the legal level. I think this is part of what happened in society, in our culture. So we need to adjust and adapt also the rules, the Israeli Constitution or potential Constitution. So this is part of it, I believe. I think that Zionism 2.0 is an update. It's a take on what we had before. Zionism 2.0 can invite also Arabs and Haredi to join. They need to decide, are they part of the project that is called the Israeli state. Do they accept the narrative that says that this is a state for the Jewish people first, and also for other people that are here? It's a democracy. It's connected to the Jewish roots, not necessarily in a religious way. So we're separating actually religion from the state. We are going to fight our enemies if needed, and we want peace because this is also part of of the roots of being Jewish here. And I think that a lot of people are looking for that, but they have no political home today. They're tired, they're sick and tired of the politicians. They don't want them. There are people who are there 30 years, 25 years. They've been there. They said they promised and they broken every promise. They need to go. So there are a lot of people who are looking for a new home. And this new home is not like an average of the left and the right. We had some center parties. It's a new Zionism. And this is the invitation also to other people that are hearing us now to rejoin Zionism and understand that Zionism today is a lot about identity and what are we fighting for and the ability to merge these two aspects of Israel, the democratic side and the Jewish side, which are both amazing. We can get a lot from them a lot of inspiration and a lot of answers to challenges that all the liberal democracies are facing today and many other countries, actually. I think this is what we're bringing to the table today.Which brings us to El Hadegel, which brings us to this movement that you and a few other partners have established. El Hadegel means to the flag, towards the flag. What is it and how is it going to address the many problems that you've discussed and many others that we haven't had time to get to? What's its purpose?El Hadegel is a political movement that is coming to lead Israel and to set a new vision for Israel to celebrate our 100th birthday, 20 something years from now as a very strong country, spiritually, culturally, financially, financially, and also being safe with all the neighbors that we have here, and potentially living in peace with our neighbors. And I think this is possible for us because we are now standing in a crossroad. One line is taking us to a very bad direction, that we are fighting each other, that we are becoming weak, that the education level is dropping, that the economy is not that strong, that brains are leaving. Startups, my friend, startups are established in the US or other places. People are, they have the dilemma if they want to stay here, becoming more religious and not in a good way. And I think this is one direction. And there is another direction where we get along together. We agree on the rules of the game and we respect it. We understand that the different parts of Israel and the Jewish people are actually our advantage. We need to bring them together. We need to find a way to collaborate. We need to be very pragmatic and practical. And we don't need to ask us, is it considered left or is it considered right? We need to ask one question, is it good for Israel or not? And that's our movement. So we are coming to lead our faces towards the political side, and we want to disrupt the political system. Disrupt it in a way that to be the first political party that is not part of any camp, not the right or the left, not the yes, Bibi or the not, Bibi. And because the way politics in Israel are designed, crafted, if you have such a party, even if it's not a huge party and receives, let's say, 5 to 10 mandates, we can hold the key for a Zionist government that is not dependent, not on the Haredim, not on Ben Gvir, not on the Arab parties. They will be invited to join within the lines of the Zionist state. And this is our goal.How do we get there? How does a bunch of young people, most of you guys are in your 30s, I would imagine, right? Most of you were not even born yet when Bibi started his political career, quite literally. How does a group of people, hugely talented, deeply committed to the state, what's the game plan for moving from having conversations like this and salons in various homes and meeting with the Yeshivot and talking at schools to getting 5-10 mandates? What's the process?So there are two levels. One is the ideas that we're bringing and the plans, the solutions for real problems that we have in Israel.Give us some example. On your website, there's four basic areas where you talk about.We have four flags that are creating. It's like a moon shots for Israel, drastic changes that will take Israel to the right direction. The first thing is around security. We need to be safe here. And we understand that the conception that we have here is broken. We need to change it. We need to understand that Arab countries around us, they don't want us here. That's the situation currently. I hope it will change. And they play a game that is, they see the Eternity. Time is not relevant. They will wait as much as needed. We see what Iran is trying to do. They don't want to conquer Israel. They want to make life miserable here. And sometimes they succeed. And I think that what we need to understand, we need to offer two ways to deal with it. One is saying that if you want normalization with us, if you want peace, you need to let go of the idea that Israel won't exist. You need to change the education. You need to change all the terror and the attacks that you're doing. You need to change all the effort that you're doing globally to shift the mindset of other countries. And this is something that we can check and measure. And if you do that, there is a path for peace. For example, Lebanon, take Hezbollah out, take their weapons. We can have peace. Same in Syria, and also a bit more complicated, but also with the Palestinians. There is another way. If you don't do it, what will happen? We need a leverage there. We need to understand what hurts them the most. What's your answer for that? What hurts them the most?Losing power.I think losing land.Interesting. Okay, that would mean that if you fight us and you lose land, we're not giving it back.Maybe somewhere in the future, if things will change. But for now, you need to understand that every day that passes, your strategic situation is getting worse. If you're not on the path of normalization and peace, you are on the path of war. And this is something we need to understand. And if we stand like this very strong, I believe the thing will start to change and move. Otherwise, we will continue to suffer time after time after time, doing the same all over again, hurting a lot of people, and actually creating more problems for the future. Because war is creating more war, and we need to find a way to stop it. I think that this is something that we need to do. And around all this flags are things about like all Israelis need to serve in the army. This is part of the agreement between citizens in Israel. Arabs, too? Arabs need to serve, not necessarily the army, but they can serve.Serve national service or something like that.National service, Firefighters and hospitals and other places because they are part of our society. And it will make them also feel more connected and partners. And we need it. Israel needs it. And they will serve. The ones that will choose not to serve, regardless from where they come, they won't get all the extra financial benefits that people get in Israel, like support in housing, like discounts in tax and other things. So this is around and also reconnecting to the Zionist approach that says that creating the agriculture and establishing settlements on the border of Israel, the border with Lebanon and Syria and Egypt and Jordan and also you would have Yehuda and Shomron, but not only. So it's a whole plan around Israel, which is part of making sure that Israel will be safe.That's flag number one.Yeah. Flag number two, economy. We need to be a very good partner for the world. Other nations, there needs to be a need. And we have no gas, and oil and industry or cheap industry and other things. But we do have our brains and we need a vision how Israel in 50 years from now can be a very strong financial power in the world. We have everything that is needed here, but we need to create the regulation, the tax, the support, the incentives in order to make sure it happens, in order to make sure that the brands stay here and that big companies are developed here, not only startups and exits. For that, we also need education. We're going to touch on that. But two other things. It's very expensive to live in Israel. We have so many people who are cutting parts along the way until it gets to people who need it until it gets to the market. We have a lot of regulation, taxation, and tariffs, and many, many things that we need to stop. Israel needs to have a full free market. And if we do want to support something like agriculture or something like that, it doesn't need to be instead of having a free market, we can support it, but directly to the one that we want support. So that's around the economy. And the third thing is cutting in 30 % the overhead of the public sector. We have today 30 something offices in government. We need maximum 15 ministries. And so we've created a plan together with people that are coming from the public sector to understand how can we make it happen. How could we save almost 30 billion shekels. Because what's happening today in Israel, that part of being a politician is giving jobs to people and not really necessary jobs and not very people are qualified for that, not being accountable for what they came to do. So this is something we must do in Israel.People have to understand that the way that people build coalitions is they say, if you join my coalition, you'll get a certain amount of ministries. But if I've already given away defense and the economy and I've given away the environment, whatever, I've got to come up with other stuff. So I'll create a Ministry of this and a Ministry of that. But as you said, each Ministry comes with a whole apparatus and hundreds or thousands of jobs and get nothing done and a huge waste of time. You speak in your materials about really wanting not only to cut overhead in government by about 30 %. Some people might say it sounds a little bit like Elon Musk, but it sounds much more grounded to me than that. You talk a lot about what you want to do with the Ministry of Education, specifically. You have a It should operate entirely differently. Tell us what's wrong with the Ministry of Education and what you want to do to change it, because I think people are probably aware that the level of education in Israel is cratering. I mean, it's just our numbers in terms of international tests and so forth is going way down. As you've intimated several times in the conversation, that's our magic sauce. I mean, if we don't have that, we're sunk. We've got to turn the educational system around. What's El Hadegel's approach to the Ministry of Education? We understand that the Ministry of Education is broken, actually, we have different educational systems in Israel, the Arab one, the Haredi, the secular, the religious one, and they're not speaking in the same language. We need a basic level of what it is to be a citizen in Israel. What is to be a citizen that love the country, that respect the laws, that is democratic and connected to the vision of what is Israel. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is that how do we educate our children to be independent, independently thinking, independent financially, being able to work? And this is not the case today in Israel. Almost half of Israeli children are not receiving such education, and therefore, they are unable to compete in the 21st century market, the global market. And this is something we must have. So what we are saying is that actually education system in Israel today is the operator, is the regulator, and is everything altogether one of the biggest ministries in the government. And this is something we don't need. We need a very, very thin education system that is actually enforcing these two levels of identity and the tools to be an independent citizen, and making sure that if you want to get budget from the state, you need to give this. If you don't give it, you don't get budget. And that's very basic. It's the same as we said around serving. If you don't serve, you don't get. If you don't educate, you don't get. We cannot be, in Israel, you say, in Hebrew, you say SchunaThe neighborhood, yeah. It's like you make deals all the time.Yeah, you cannot be all the time cutting the edges. If you want to be a strong country, you need to work like that. And you need your citizens to respect that. And you need to have plans. So that's about Ministry of Education. We have an amazing, in every flag that I shared, we have an amazing team, people who are very experienced. And also we have a huge community of Israelis that are either involved in it, care about it, have experience in that, and want to influence. And the last flag is around the system, the political system, there was a lot of debate in Israel and fighting around changing the justice system.The whole judicial reform issue.Yeah. And this was part of what broke us and brought us to October 7th, when you were talking about October 6h and not going back there. Actually, this is part of it because people were so scared of that that they were willing to fight and even to jeopardize Israel in order to make sure that we won't become a dictatorship or whatever. But both sides took an extreme position. But actually what is needed is to set up a balanced relationship between the authorities. So the Knesset, the parliament, became very weak in the current years. The justice system became very strong and also the government, and they started fighting between each other. What we are suggesting is a reform that will bring more power to the Knesset, which is representing the people, actually. And they need to have more freedom to to actually criticize and to have also power to tell the Minister of Education, Come, we want performance review. What did you do? What's your budget? Did you meet your goals? Which is something that we don't have today. But another thing that we need, actually, is also more power and freedom for people who are elected to do what they want. In the United States, the President can do almost everything that he wants. In Israel, it's not the case. I'm an entrepreneur. I had a lot of friction with the lawyer of the company. Every time, this is part of it's inherent. And we have it also in the government. It's okay. But we need to make sure that eventually the elected people can do what they want and they need to be accountable for that. Of course, it needs to be to go along the regulation and everything. So I think that part of it is actually making sure that the justice system and and the advisors are in the right position to criticize, to put the red lines, but also not to prevent a very efficient, practical government that is able to actually to execute their plans. And as you said before, limiting terms. I think this is very important, especially in Israel, and not only the Prime Minister, but many other positions that are needed. We're working on that as well. So as you see, we have plans.Yeah, you have a lot of plans, and your website is filled with them, and there's a lot of people to talk to. If you had a guess, let's just say there are not elections until October 26. That's when they're called for now. They might happen earlier, who knows? But let's assume that that's when they happen. Where would you guess most of the votes for El Hadegel are going to come from? The people who voted for you are people that voted for the center, the left? I mean, you expect to get votes from people that voted from Ben Gvir, for Smotrich, for Bibi. I mean, realistically, you guys, I'm sure, sit around very long hours working this out, trying to figure this. You're incredibly smart. If you had to guess, where's the bulk of the votes going to come from? Was it the people that did all the reserves, their families?El Hadegel is built like a startup. It's a political movement with a lot of startup-like things. For example, data. We analyze everything, we collect everything. It's a very data-driven organization, automations. Also, we are spread all over Israel with volunteers and employees that are in every big city, in every important place. We are there in the field, meeting people, understanding what are the problems. We are working very hard on that as well. We are very connected to what is happening. And also doing polls and research and everything. So what we see is that there are a lot of people in Israel who are disappointed. They're disappointed from the coalition. They're disappointed from the opposition. They're disappointed from the politicians, from Netanyahu and from Lapid and from everyone. They don't want to see them. They understand that this is what we have now and they need to choose, but they don't want to choose them. These people are all the way from, let's say, Smotrich today, the Tzionut Datit.Religious line, isn't it?Until Yesh Atid, until Yair Lapid, the center of liberal side. And also a bit in the edges. But what we see more is that if you go to a young generation under 40, you see that they are more receptive for change. Eventually, in Israel, people are voting very traditionally. When you go to vote, your hand moves, shakes, and it's very hard to make a decision to vote for something else. But after October 7th, people feel that something needs to change. They want a new generation. They want new blood. They want a way. And we are offering a new way. Zionism 2.0, we are offering solutions, very practical one. We are not part of this debate and fighting between yes, Bibi and not Bibi. And this is very important. We don't boycott anyone. We want to be in the government, influencing the government, making sure that it will be a better government because the way it's designed in Israel, you always have one party that is actually anchoring the government and influencing the most the direction that it goes. We want to be this one. And we need support. We need Israelis. And we see there is a momentum. 50,000 people join. It's growing and growing. And on the social media and also the traditional media, we are more and more accepted. And we are there in channel 14 as well and 12, all the channels. So we are working very hard. It's not easy because we were not politicians before. We are not generals. We are not part of the traditional media. So there is a barrier of entry that we need to overcome. And obviously, the politicians made sure that it will be very hard to compete with them. So they created a lot of regulation, a lot of boundaries for us to cross. But we have nothing to lose. If we were willing to go to Gaza and Lebanon and Syria. We were willing, as people who already have children, to risk our lives. So we are now willing to go and to be called to this flag. We hear the calling and we are coming, and we You have nothing to lose. This is the future of our children. This is the future of Israel. And if you come like this when you have nothing to lose and you don't need to serve anyone else besides the people of Israel and the Zionist interests of Israel, then I feel that this is a great chance to succeed.It's very inspiring, I have to say. For those people who live outside of Israel who very much want to see the new blood and they want to see new faces, they want to hear new names, they want a sense of new opportunities, what can they do to join this? Is there a way for people outside the country to get involved in this?Of course. I have a lot of friends living in the States, and I feel that the challenge that we are facing, and also global challenge of Jewish people around the world, I want Jewish people that are not living in Israel to be proud of Israel. We need to have a common narrative. And I feel that the challenge that Israel is facing, and on the other hand, the antisimism that people are experiencing outside of Israel, is creating the alliance that actually brought Israel alive, brought Zionism. So there is always this connection. We need endorsement. We need support. We need funds. We need to be invited to come and visit Jewish communities and reconnect them to what is happening in Israel. I know that a lot of people reconnected through the war and supported a lot. We need also to reconnect around the new story. We need to reconnect around the vision I hope and I believe that it is possible that Israel will be the best place for every Jewish people in the world to choose to live here, not because it's not safe to live outside, because it's the best place to live here. I think this is what Israel could be. This is what it needs to be, and this is our responsibility to make sure that it will happen. So, yeah, the invitation is to learn more about us, to invite us, to support us, to donate everything. We'll give all the links later on and also to challenge us. There are issues that we need the challenge as well, and we are open to learn. So we need the help, of course.David Sherez, to you and your partners in building El Hadegel, thank you for who you are, for what you're doing, for infusing us with a sense of hope and possibility at a time that we desperately need it. It really warms the heart. Wish you tremendous success, and thank you so much for taking time out of an incredibly busy schedule to talk with us today.Thank you very much. Am Israel Chai.

Amen.

Golan is a serious and accomplished person, and he knows that what he was said not true. Why he allowed himself to say something like that, on the radio, at a time when he needs to be building his political base and not eroding it, I cannot begin to explain.

But the comment caused shock waves in Israel and did him no political help (though polls show that at least as of now, the blowback has cost him only one seat in projected Knesset election results, and that the opposition under Naftali Bennet would still be able to topple the government without Arab or Haredi parties, though not by much).

In fairness to Golan, though, people deserve to know about him not just for that comment, but for his personality and commitments in general. Golan, who is an accomplished soldier, a genuine hero, and who has devoted his entire life to the State of Israel, made a statement clarifying what he either meant or wished he’d said. In fairness to him, it felt important to share that, too.

The video of his comments, to which we’ve added subtitles for our readers, is above. We’ll come back to Golan’s statement below, though for those who may not read to the end, I will say this up front:

One can agree with him, one can disagree. One can plan to vote for him, or plan on voting for someone else.

Still, one particular statement of his struck a chord with me and with many others I know—his comment that there’s a sad and enraging irony about the fact that it is Smotrich and Ben Gvir, both of whom are essentially draft dodgers, who are pushing to keep the war going.

As the father of a reservist who has been called up more than once in this war, I need to know (and so does he, when he leaves his wife and children) that whoever is calling him back to battle is doing so because they believe that it is genuinely what Israel needs, and not what will serve their own political (some would say racist) agendas.

Many of us parents, and many of those reservists, no longer have that confidence. Our sons and daughters are increasingly pawns in a dangerous game that someone else is playing for a variety of likely self-serving purposes. On that score alone, Yair Golan’s comments probably struck a chord even with many who have no plans to vote for him.

More on Golan below.

In the meantime, though, more about yesterday’s point regarding the growing absence of moderation in Israeli political discourse. We pointed yesterday to two examples of statements that reflect the kind of hyperbole and nastiness that Israel simply cannot afford at this junction—Golan’s comment about babies, and Yehudah Schlessinger’s remark that there are no innocent Gazan’s, and they should thus all be killed.

Lest one imagine that those were each a one-off, we return to the same phenomenon today, simply because yesterday’s news afforded more of this, and it’s important to understand what’s brewing in order to understand where we may be headed.

We’ve been here before, of course. In the latter months of the judicial reform period, which Hamas brought to an end when it slaughtered 1200 Israelis and dragged us into a war we did not want and for which we were obviously horribly unprepared, the vitriol had gotten so bad that President Herzog had already warned that Israelis were likely going to shed the blood of other Israelis, while Ari Shavit warned that a country so divided was begging to be invaded.

Shavit was tragically proven right. Herzog’s warning, which he has repeated again much more recently, has, thankfully, not yet come true (though several police officers have now been charged with using excess violence against protesters and then seeking to corrupt the investigations of their behavior). But this fraught period of political divide is far from over, and thus there is tragically much time remaining for Herzog’s warning about Israelis killing Israelis to come true.

Is that what it will take to get people to come back to their senses?

Just yesterday, the government itself had to address two other examples of extreme or even libelous comments by its own members.

One of the instances actually took place more than a year ago, but was finally ruled on by the Knesset Ethics Committee

As you can read in the ToI article and screenshot above, Likud MK Nissim Vaturi called in late 2023 and early 2024 for Israel to “burn Gaza.” Some would obviously say that that’s more or less what happened, but he meant something wider than what’s happened, and other MK’s promptly complained.

As you can see, the Knesset Ethics Committee ruled that his comments were protected by his right to express his political ideology, though the Committee also did belabor the obvious, noting that the remarks brought no dignity to the Knesset.

Of course, MK’s not contributing to the dignified reputation of the Knesset is not exactly a new story.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Then there’s the latest case of Israel’s Ambassador to the US saying that the “extreme left,” which is accusing Netanyahu of prolonging the war for political purposes, was committing a “blood libel.”

There were many things wrong with the comment made by Leiter, who is by most accounts, a decent fellow. The purpose of the “poison machine” (as it’s commonly called in Israel and about which we’ll hear more tomorrow in our podcast with a Shira Eting, a former combat helicopter pilot who also headed the protest movement in 2023) is to discount anyone who disagrees with the government by suggesting that they are enemies of the Zionist project, or liars, etc. Thus, anything “left” or “center” in Israel is now called “extreme left,” to suggest that it is non-Zionist or anti-Zionist.

But who is it who actually thinks that Bibi is prolonging the war? Is it just the “extreme left”? No. Actually, it’s most of the country, it turns out. And Leiter knows that, which is why the government is panicking and why its representatives are pressing all the buttons on the “poison machine.” Note the bottom right story in the TOI screenshot above.

Recent surveys indicate that a significant majority of Israelis believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war for political purposes. According to a July 2024 poll by N12 (Channel 12), 54% of Israelis attribute the continuation of the war primarily to political motivations. Another Channel 12 survey found that 55% of respondents believe Netanyahu’s main goal is staying in power rather than winning the war or freeing hostages. Additionally, 59% of respondents in a Channel 12 survey believe that Netanyahu’s handling of the hostages issue is driven by "political considerations.”

While the exact wording and timing of each poll may differ, these results consistently suggest that a clear majority—over half—of Israelis believe Netanyahu is prolonging the war for political reasons.

So first, the characterization of the view as being that of the “extreme left” was grossly inexact, when in fact, it’s actually a minority of the country that believes otherwise.

And second, as Yechiel Leiter knows very well, “blood libels” were accusations against Jews that often led to Jews’ being slaughtered. What, exactly, was he trying to say when he used that term? What he trying to excuse something that he suspects may be coming?

The Foreign Ministry, which has summoned him to explain, will likely find out. Or not. What the ramifications will be for Leiter, of course, we pretty much already know.

Which brings us back to Yair Golan’s statement above. One can agree with his politics, or not. If one is an Israeli citizen, one can vote for him, or not. But what the country needs is for everyone to begin casting even those they disagree with in the best possible light, not the most negative.

Yair Golan is a serious person who said something he shouldn’t have. And it took him too long to walk it back. Ok, duly noted. But he’s much bigger and much more thoughtful than the comment to which we pointed yesterday, which is why in the video above, we’re exposing the more measured Golan to our readers.

TUESDAY: Shira Eting is a former helicopter pilot, a leader of the anti-judicial reform protest movement (during which she figured prominently in a much discussed 60 Minutes interview) and recently shared some powerful thought online about this past Independence Day. I reached out to her to ask her to share her sentiments with us, which she did.

WEDNESDAY: Many people have heard of “Wingate,” the sports facility where many of Israel’s finest athletes train. But why is it called Wingate? Who was he? We’ll hear about the extraordinary story of British officer Charles Orde Wingate, his fascinating and complex personality and a unique period in Zionist history.

And….. What makes life here so compelling, despite all of this, are the stories of people who are very different, who represent the very best of who we can be. Coming soon, the story of a female combat soldier, badly wounded on Passover, and her thoughts on her condition and her service.

That’s what Edan Alexander said to Donald Trump in the video above, released by the White House. Edan, and particularly his mother, have taken a lot of heat on Israeli social media for thanking Donald Trump and not Benjamin Netanyahu. It might have been an oversight—but perhaps not.

Either way, having a just-released hostage say to the President, “You’re the only reason that I’m here” couldn’t have sat well with the Prime Minister (who since then has announced that he’s willing to end the Gaza War as long as Trump Gaza relocation plan is implemented—which is another way of saying he’s not willing to end the war).

In general, it’s been a rocky couple of weeks for the famous bromance, which culminated in a report—that the White House is of course denying—that the US warned Israel to end the war, or else ….

A White House official either did say it or didn’t say it. It either is what Trump feels and is planning, or it’s not. We’ll know eventually, or we won’t. Such is the nature of the leaders in question.

Either way, Israel’s international standing, even according to the internal Israeli Hebrew press, is nearing an all-time low. Consider, for example, this headline from Tuesday on YNet:

Large black headline: The US is keeping quiet, the the sanctions are intensifying: the road to Israel’s diplomatic nadir

Smaller black subheader: Israel’s international stature is collapsing, and damage to the economy could reach billions. Three international powers issues an unprecedented threat—and Britain has already acted on them. In the US, the decision was made not to come to Israel’s support: “Trump is frustrated.”

Two bullet points at the bottom:

* Israeli negotiating team returns from Qatar: “there were no real negotiations”

* A 10-fold increase in the number of humanitarian aid trucks; the UN: “they never reached us.”

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

To share a sense of how the complex relationship between Israel and the US, between Bibi and Trump has become, we’ll close off this week by sharing a photo that went a bit viral on Israeli social media.

A protester in favor of ending the war and getting the hostages out, herself dressed with a gag over her mouth and her arms tied in ropes, is holding an astonishing sign.

Why is it astonishing? Because while I don’t know anything at all about the woman in the picture, the political “right” is mostly not present at these protests. So we can fairly assume that she’s not on the right (though of course we can’t be certain).

And what is she saying? The word TRUST, if you look carefully, is composed of photographs of hostages. The hostage families believe—again, rightly or wrongly, I’m not taking a stand—that if there’s any hope for their loved ones who are now being held captive by Hamas’ barbarians, that hope is the leader of the United States, not the leader of Israel.

Talk about ironies. Talk about politics and bedfellows. People in Israel on the left and in the center, hardly the ones one would expect to be singing Donald Trump’s praises, are doing exactly that.

Next week promises to be interesting. Of course, most weeks here are.

When Rabbi Schlessinger finished speaking, neither of us uttered a word. Even now, what he said continues to reverberate in my mind, and I hope that it will do the same for you.

As I mentioned yesterday, one of the questions that has lodged itself in my mind is that of what I would call “Jewish religiosity with moderation at its heart.” By that I don’t mean this movement or that movement, or this way of Jewish life or that way of Jewish life, this mode of practice or that mode of practice. Rather, the question that I've been thinking about quite a bit is “What would it take for the fundamental pulse of traditional Judaism in Israel to be one of acceptance, of embrace, of tolerance, of love?”

That that description does not characterize Israel’s religious establishment is, I think, a proposition that scarcely needs defending. That it also does not characterize wide swathes of “religious” Israelis (it’s true of “non-religious” Israelis as well, of course) is also sadly not really up for debate.

What would it take to transform the pulse of Jewish religious life from what it is to something very different? Is it possible? Buried inside those questions are issues that are relevant not only to Judaism and not only to Israel, and there is a vast, vast literature on religion, moderation, tolerance, the tendency for religious passion to produce extremism, and much more. That’s far beyond the pale of our focus here.

So what we’re doing periodically on Israel from the Inside is to speak with people who do represent a Judaism of tolerance, of embrace, of love. We’re trying to hear from them how they got to where they are, who influenced them religiously, how it feels for them to be part of the wider religious picture in Israel, what they think we might do to create more people like them.

As noted yesterday, we’re doing a “mini-series” on that subject this week, and will continue with more in the future. Yesterday, we heard from Rabbi Na’ama Levitz Applbaum, and today we hear from Rabbi Hanan Schlessinger, an Orthodox rabbi who lives over the Green Line who has views that made me think even more. I hope his words will do the same for many of our listeners.

Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger is an Orthodox rabbi, teacher, and co-founder of Roots/Shorashim/Judur, a movement fostering understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. Originally from New York, he moved to Israel at 20 and has lived in Alon Shvut for four decades. His work in interfaith dialogue, especially during his years in Dallas, transformed his approach to peacebuilding. Today, he advocates for recognizing both Israeli and Palestinian narratives. He and his wife Ayala have four children and eleven grandchildren.

To learn more about Roots (Shorashim), click HERE.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

In this day and age, I think it's particularly important, not only to our minds, but especially to our souls, to hear from people whose engagement with Israel and whose belief in the future of Israeli society is such that it takes us out of the pathways that we usually think in, whether because the subject matter is different or the orientation is different, or the soulfulness is different. I know that I, living here and being somewhere between sad and distraught, somewhere along that line, moving backwards and forwards over that continuum over the last year and a half, have found my encounters with people who are doing something very different, something very positive, something very forward-looking, deeply healing for my soul. And I, therefore, was delighted that today's guest, Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, who is the head of the North American Outreach Division of Roots, and he'll tell us more specifically about the work that he does and so forth.

Roots, "Shorashim," is in an organization that I've known about for years. We had a student here at Shalem who was very involved with it. I met the Muslim founder of it a number of years ago, and Rabbi Schlesinger has since then gotten very, very involved. But before we get to Roots, and before we talk about what it's doing, and before we talk about what the current war has done to shape its work and the thinkers of its leaders, I wanted to ask Rabbi Schlesinger, beyond thanking him for being with us today, to begin by telling us the story of his journey from Long Island to Shorashim, Roots. He lives in Alon Shvut, which is not too far from Efrat. If those of you who know Efrat, it's south, southwest, more or less, of Jerusalem. When there's no traffic, it's a 20-minute drive. When there is traffic, it's a two-hour drive, depending on the traffic in the tunnels. So he lives in an area that is commonly associated with people being to the political right. It's certainly not true of everyone. We've had other people on the podcast who come from that part of the country who are also not there.

But he is a person who stands for his own views and who I think represents something really important for all of us to hear. So, Rabbi Schlesinger, first of all, Thank you very much for taking the time. Tell us a little bit about the journey from Long Island, that I think it's Texas, where the major transformations take place to the Gush, to Alon Shvut, to work with Shorashim Roots.

How long do you have? Five hours? Okay. Thank you for having me. I was born in New York on Long Island to a secular, assimilated Jewish family. I got a Jewish education Reform afternoon school from the third grade. I was bar mitzvah-ed. I wasn't connected in any sense at all, really, to my Jewish heritage. Until the end of eighth grade, I joined Young Judea, Zionist youth movement.

Yes, so did I. Look at that. We're the two that drank the Kool-Aid. There's actually a lot of people from my Young Judea year on the southeast who got here. But anyway, go ahead.

So I joined Young Judea totally for social reasons. I was in love with the girl who is the president. And I, like you said, drank the Kool-Aid. I became a very fervent Zionist. I came to Israel during the summer after 10th grade with Young Judea, and then I went on the Young Judea year course after high school. And in the process of becoming a Zionist, I began to develop a sense that Zionism was the second or third story of a Jewish identity, and the foundation was or had to be Jewish history, Jewish connection to the land. It had to be more that it had to be something metaphysical, something that was obligating me to take upon this Jewish identity, this Jewish journey. If I'm going to leave my home, leave my parents, leave what was dreamed for me to be a good Jewish doctor and to go to make the desert bloom in some kibbutz, that would be a pretty good reason for it. So I wanted to do it. I wanted to make aliyah. I wanted to...

But politics alone wasn't going to capture it. It needed to be politics plus something, higher, deeper, wider.

Yes, exactly. So I began at the end of high school last year to look into, to learn a little bit about the religious Judaism. I got connected to Marty Cheson, who was a leader in Young Judea, who had himself become religious. I think I did some type of Shabbaton with him. And I began to observe Shabbat, then went on Year Course and began to observe more mitzvot to become religious. But I want to make it so clear it wasn't out of a belief in God. It was out of a search for the foundation for my Zionist belief. And I remember saying to myself and saying to others, 20 years later, 30 years later, 40 years later, did I find God? No. Yes, maybe. But I found a framework that gave me meaning for life.

We're going to fast forward in a second, and you become an Orthodox rabbi, but I want to talk about then Texas, and then whatever. But it's fascinating that you say that about God. I don't think we were going to talk about God so much in this conversation. But since you raise God, do you think that it's the lack of theological certainty in some way that gives you a nimbleness to engage with different kinds of communities? Do you think that theological certitude makes it more difficult to engage with Christians as you are doing in the States and Muslims as you're doing here? Or is that just irrelevant?

Thank you very, very much for the question. And when this podcast ends, I'm going to go home and think about it more. I've thought about that a little bit, and I don't have a full answer. But the very fact that I don't have a full answer means there may be something to what you are bringing up. Thank you.

Well, my pleasure. It always gets me to think when people come in and talk even a tiny bit about their own searches. And I was also struck, and I just want to reiterate it again for our listeners, that there are a lot of us here who, whatever our views are, left, center, right, it doesn't make any difference, believe that sustaining the passion for this place in purely political terms is almost impossible. I certainly believe it's impossible because you say, okay, it's important for the future of the Jewish people, but the why does the Jewish people matter. We've been around for a very long time. Okay, we have something to say. The rest of the world needs to hear. That's true. What is it? Then the conversation gets very quiet. And I agree with you. I think that many of the people who have become the most passionate engagers with Israel, whether they live in Israel, they live outside, come from a place, it doesn't necessarily have to be God or theology, but they come from some metaphysical spot, which is a kind of a stereo. There's the political side as the left speaker, and the metaphysical side as the right and they get braided together.

You eventually go on, you become an Orthodox rabbi. I want to talk specifically about the time when you begin to move out of what I would guess I call a Jewish cocoon, which any rabbi in America could easily find themselves in because you're an educator, you're highly in demand, you're working with lots of different Jewish communities. Then something happens that gets you to put your toes in the water of a very different way of engaging with other religious communities. Tell us what that was.

Okay, so I made Aliyah when I was about 20, 21. Very quickly, I came to a Alon Shvut, to Gush Etzion, I've been living there since about 1980. I learned in the Yeshiva, Yeshivat Har Etzion, altogether for about 10 years. I did Hester. But I was never fully part of the mainstream religious Zionist movement. Number one, I followed my teachers, Rav Amital and Rav Lichtenstein.

Who were the two chief leaders, intellectual powers behind the Yeshiva in Gush Etzion.

And they were not in the mainstream of religious Zionism. They were in the middle, moderate, some would even call them left. They were in favor of Oslo, for example.

They were free thinkers, I think more than anything. They were free thinkers. They had a PhD in literature from Harvard, if I'm not mistaken. English literature. So in addition to being a world-renowned scholar, he had a whole other secular intellectual world. They were just free thinkers. They didn't tow anybody's line. Yeah.

I was part of Meymad. I was part of Oz v'Shalom.

These are all political parties and movements that people may not remember anymore that were there trying to move things forward on the peace front.

So the point there is I was never in the right wing mainstream of the settler movement, but I was a settler. I was part of the society in Alon Shvut. And then What happened is that I went on shlichut. I went as an emissary of Yeshiva University, actually, 2005 to Dallas, Texas, to be the Rosh Kollel of a religious scientist kollel, the head, the educational head. And I got involved with Christian Zionists. I greatly respected their support of Israel. They were raising a lot of money for the state of Israel. I wanted to help them. I was open to reaching out and seeing who they are. I worked with an organization founded by Pastor John Hagee with other organizations. And through meeting them on the Zionist issue, we got to talk about theology. I'm interested in theology, philosophy. And through that, I got involved in meeting other Christians who weren't Zionists, liberal Christians. And I got to meet Muslim leaders. And I was so fascinated by meeting people of faith who had a different faith than I did. I felt it was expanding me. It was making me more human. It was expanding me, is the word.

So I helped to found an organization called Faiths and Conversations. We did lots and lots of interfaith dialogs. I got very close to some Christian and Muslim clergymen, and I discovered that there was depth and beauty to Christianity. I'd never thought about that before. As a teacher of Judaism, Christianity has always been a foil for me, what we don't believe in. I really didn't know what they believe in, but I thought I knew. And then I began to see, wow, they have this deep, deep, meaningful theology that's far beyond what I usually see in Judaism. I wanted to explore it. I felt it was just making me a better human being and a better Jew, talking and learning and being expanded. So when I came back home to Israel, this was 2013, I wanted to found an organization of interfaith dialog in Gush Etzion, where I live, Alon Shvut, the other settlements, just like I had in Dallas. So I began to meet primarily Christian clergymen. And then a certain point, I realized I was barking up the wrong tree because like we say in Hebrew, the asimon dropped. I realized I had a moment of understanding that, well, in America, we, Jews, Christians, and Muslims speak the same language.

We're in the same civic sphere. We go to the same supermarkets. We vote in the same elections. We have this common ground that allows us to talk about our differences of religion. But here in Israel, I don't have any of that common ground with the people I'm reaching out to, the Christian and Muslim clergymen. So I said, wait a second, before you try to meet clergymen, try to meet men. Just get to know the people. And I realized I don't know any Palestinians. I don't know anyone is not Jewish.

By the way, I just want to point out, I hate to interrupt, but I just want to point out that when my kids were in high school, I won't say which one, but one of my kids was in high school table, and he had a friend over for Shabbat lunch. There's a bunch of people around the Shabbat table. It's usually a big gathering. We happened to have that week, this goes back a long, long time. This kid is in his late 30s now. We had a person that I had met through work who was a Muslim for Shabbat lunch also. And after this person left, my son's friend said, Wow, I never met an Arab before. There was an Arab that cleans the stairwell in our apartment, and I've interacted with them at the pharmacy or whatever. But I've never actually sat in a social setting with an Arab. This was a 17, I think, year old Israeli kid, raised here from birth and in a fairly open part of Israeli society. And when he said that, I was like, wow, we're in a lot of trouble in a lot of different kinds of ways. And so you're saying the same thing. We don't go to the same supermarket. We were literally, except for a little bit down in the circle there in the Gush, where I think some Palestinians do go to Rami Levy. I think that particular supermarket is frequented by Jews and Muslims, but there are very few of them. And certainly, socially, we're separated, and neighborhoods or cities-wise, we're separated. I think your point is so well taken. You can't really live in most American neighborhoods. There's a few exceptions, but you can't live in most American neighborhoods and not know Christian people. You can't work in most American places and not know Christian people. But you could live your whole life in Israel as a Jew, even as a non-cloistered Jew, and basically never encounter an Arab in a meaningful way.

And I just want to emphasize, it's not only that I hadn't met Palestinians, but secondly, that I didn't have the cognition that I'd never met one.

That's super important. How did you go about meeting them? What do you do?

Here's the next story that brought me to meet my Palestine neighbors. I hosted in Gush Etzion two Evangelical pastors supporters of Israel, who had been friends of mine from my days in Dallas. They asked me to show them around, and I had a sense that they felt that they were experiencing through me the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Yes, it says in Isaiah, it says in Jeremiah that the Israelites, the sons and daughters of God, will return home one day, and they were living it through me. So I showed them around. I brought them to Bat Ayin, to the ancient mikvah there. I brought them to Derech Avot, the patriarch's way, where you have mikvaot, ritual baths, from 2000 years ago. We drove around, and I saw a hitchhiker on the side of the road, a young man. I picked them up together with two pastors in the car. Then another hitchhiker. So we're driving with the two pastors and the two hitchhikers. The two young men ask out of the car. I dropped them off. We started to drive again. And then the pastor from Texas, whose name was Bob Roberts, said, Hanan, wow, you taught us a lesson in Jewish ethics. That was great. You picked up hitchhikers. No one does that in Texas. So I said to him, Bob, it's not just me. Around here we all pick up hitchhikers. We have a common vision. We trust each other. And I do my best, just like everyone else, to pick up every person who puts finger for a ride. And by the time I finished that sentence, I realized that I was lying. I was lying to Bob and to Kevin. Even worse, I was lying to myself. I said that I pick up every person, and I believe that I pick up every person. But no, I only pick up Jews. I'd never picked a Palestine in my life. And I'm not now, and I wasn't then, apologizing for not picking up Palestinians, but just it dawned on me.

You don't even think about it.

I guess they don't exist for me. I guess they're not human. They're not on the radar screen. And I got into a theological moral discussion with my two friends, and I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that I have some type of moral blemish, at least moral blindness. The Palestinians aren't human beings in my eyes. They're like the gray drab scenery that pass in the background of the movie, the Jewish movie, but they're not part of the plot. You ignore them. So I I took upon myself at that point in the car to do what I could do to turn the Palestinians to human beings in my eyes. And clearly, the way to do that is to meet them. I began this journey to meet my Palestine neighbors.

And just to give our people a little sense of geography, you live in Alon Shvut. You are surrounded by Palestinians. I mean, the map there has Alon Shvut, it has Elazar, it has Efrat, north and south. But the vast majority of the map in that area, if you look at Google Maps or whatever, it's lots and lots of Palestinian villages in the area. So just people need to understand. You don't have to go very far. They're right around the corner.

It's so good you mentioned the map. So I'm going to fast forward a little bit, but I'll get back to where I was. Map. So today, I know you look at the maps that our local Israeli Regional Council, the municipal government, puts out, and the maps only have the Jewish settlements. The Palestinian towns and villages are not there. That means literally the Palestinians are invisible. You really don't see them on the map. But the truth is, just like you said, we're surrounded by Palestinians. Now, I live in Alon Shvut. We're about 3,000, 4,000 people. Since I've been Alon Shvut, and for decades and centuries before that, there's been right there a five-minute walk from my front door, a little Palestine hamlet called Khirbat Shakeria. Back in those days, we're describing 11 years ago, I'd never been in Khirbat Shakeria.

Even though it was a five-minute walk.

Five-minute walk. I didn't know anyone who lived there. I didn't know anyone who knew anyone who lived there. How am I going to meet my Palestine neighbors? It's a different world. And again, to give background, we live right next to each other, the Jews and the Palestinians, but we have different educational systems, different legal systems, different cultures, different economics, different health systemsnd, and different citizenship, right? Transportation, so everything is separate.

Right. They have their own cabs. Just so everybody understand, they have their own cabs with the green license plates. We have our cabs with the yellow license plates. Everything's different.

So I won't tell all the stories of how I finally got this meeting, but I got an invitation to meet my Palestine neighbors. And now we're going back in time to the last Wednesday of January 2014. I have a map and I know when to go there. I get up from the sofa. I'm sitting in my living room. I walked to the front door, put my hand on the door knob, open the door, and put one foot over the threshold. My wife calls behind me, Where are you going? And I said, I'm going to meet Palestinians. And all hell broke loose. She screamed, What do you mean meet Palestinians? They'll kill you. And I came back in and I approached my wife and I saw the terror in her eyes. She begged me not to go. I told her I had to do this. Walked back to the door, put this time two feet over the threshold, closed the door behind me, and I so vividly remember saying to myself at that moment, Perhaps she's right. Perhaps they'll kill me. I was really afraid. My heart was pounding.

We're always afraid. We are. We just are. You have to admit it.

I walked about 25 minutes through the fields and orchards around my home, and I got to where I'm supposed to go. So it's a Palestinian farmstead surrounded by a stone fence. There are other Palestinian farms in the area. Again, I'm really afraid. I walk inside and I saw something I've never, ever seen in my life. I saw 15 Israelis, some of them my neighbors, and 15 Palestinians doing the absolute strangest thing. They were talking to each other, and that doesn't happen. So there's two over here, there's three over here, there's a group of four. And then I saw this Palestinian woman standing alone. And I approach her, she's in brown from head to toe, and her face is visible. She's clearly an observant Muslim. And I said, Hello, in English. She said hello back to me. We talk for a minute. And then I said to her, I can't believe I'm talking to you. And she responded, I can't believe I'm talking to you because we don't talk to Israeli settlers. I had no idea why she said that, but in any case, she was willing to keep talking. But the conversation didn't go on long because her son walked over and she introduced me.

She said his name as Yazin. He's 17 years old. So Yazin and I shake hands. We start to talk, and I see he's wearing a jacket. And on the jacket are three words in English, "Seeds of Peace." Seeds of Peace. I had no idea what Seeds of Peace is. No idea. But I saw that word peace, and that confused me because Yazin is a Palestinian. Why would you wear a jacket with the word peace on it? It doesn't compute. So half jokingly, I said to Yazin, What's this Seeds of Peace thing? And I was half expecting to say, I don't know, someone gave me the jacket. But instead, he told me it's the name of a summer camp in Maine, USA. He went to the camp the past summer, had a great time there, met Israeli kids, he said they're friends on Facebook now. And he said he was so affected by meeting Israelis that now he wants to spend some of his life building bridges of peace between our two peoples. And I remember listening to him and not knowing if I can believe what he's saying because it contradicted everything that I thought to be true. And today, looking back, you can say that Yazin and his mother Sadiya were the first two Palestinians that began the process of unsettling me.

Unsettling the settler.

Unsettling the settler. I I was very unsettled. The conversation was cut short with him because his father walked over. Jamal and I shake hands. And there's no way in the world I can describe what I was feeling when I shook hands with Jamal because he is swarthy. He was missing a tooth or two. He looked to me so dangerous. He looked to me so Palestinian. I'm talking about my prejudices. Yeah, of course. It was really challenging just to be together with him. He asked me, Where are you from? I said, I'm from Alon Shvut. Where are you from Jamal? Bait Ummar. He says those two words, Beit Ummar, and I had half of a heart attack. He's from Beit Ummar? The wife, the kid, they're from Beit Ummar? Because in my eyes, Beit Ummar is a den of terrorists. So Beit Ummar is a Palestinian city of about 23,000 Palestinians. It's like a 10-minute drive south of where I live today. It's on the main road. I used to live in a settlement called Karmei Tzur, which is literally bordering Bet Ummar.

My wife used to say when our kids were growing up, lived in Karmei Tzur, when she got really angry at the kids, she said, Go to Bet Ummar, go to hell. And now I'm meeting someone from hell. How could it be? How could it be? Before that, when I used to live in Karmei Tzur, I had rocks thrown at myself, my wife and kids in the car. The car is shaking. The windshield is breaking. When screaming, I had a friend, Dr. Shmuli Gili coming Hadassah Hospital, where he worked, was coming home late one night. He got gunned down there. That's the people in Beit Ummar. I'm talking to this guy? So he starts telling me the story of his life, at least how he got to this gathering, Israeli and Palestinians. And he said that in Beit Ummar, Hanan, you know, there's no Jews. Okay. But he said there are Jewish soldiers who guard the entrance to the city, and they make life miserable. Thus, we hate them. And by extension, we hate all Jews. Who in Bet Ummar? Why not ever meet a Jew over a cup of coffee? Certainly not me, Jamal said. But he had, he said, this friend who lived in Jericho, Palestinian friend many years ago.

And he said, Jamal, I go to these dialog sessions of Israelis and Palestinians. Why don't you come along sometime? And Jamal told me, I said to my friend, I'm never, ever coming with you. That's only for the weak people that trade as a proud Palestinian does not go to meet the enemy. But somehow every month, this friend is trying to convince him. And eventually Jamal tagged along. They sat in a circle in Jericho, Israelis and Palestinians. Jamal said to me, I didn't participate. I sat in the corner, but I listened to them. And at one point after the meeting was over, he said, one of the Israeli men starts to walk towards him to say hello. And Jamal said, I was really uptight. Why is he walking towards me? Why is he coming near me? And then he came right up to me, forced me to shake his hand. It was really uncomfortable. He asked me questions. I had no choice but to answer. And after this very uncomfortable conversation, Jamal said, I ran to the bathroom to wash the filth off my hand from touching a Jew, and I was never to come back to this cursed place.

And he went home, told his wife the terrible experience he had there. And she said, It was a big mistake to go, never go back. Of course, I never tell anyone in Beit Ummar that we were there. But the friend had other plans, and I really don't know Jamal didn't tell me. The next month, perhaps a month later, Jamal and his wife found themselves back in that circle in Jericho. And then another time and another time. And they became members of that group, Jamal told me. And he said, Hanan, where I thought there was only an enemy, I discovered a human being who turned out to be a partner, and that changed me. And I remember looking at Jamal and hearing him say those words, and it can't be. How could someone who looks like him say those words? A peace activist, but he's a Palestinian. And just like I didn't know if I can believe his son, when his son told me, Seeds for Peace, I am totally disoriented listening to Jamal. And I'm falling apart. My world is falling apart.

Then he tells me another story. He said, Hanan, you know, there's lots of little kids in Beit Ummar. I know. He says, Five years old, eight years old. Okay. When they see someone who looks like you, Hanan, they start to cry. And I said to him, Why did they start to cry? And Jamal thought that I was kidding with him. He believe that I don't understand why they start to cry. And he got a little bit flustered. Then he looked at my tzitzit, and he pointed at my beard, and the kippah, and he said, that's why they start to cry, because the people who look like you, they walk into Beit Ummar with their machine guns, and he does guns with his two fingers, and they shoot the kids. So I thought that that was a blood libel. By the way, parenthetically, today it's true. I thought it was a blood libel. What are you talking about? He's an anti-Semite, and I'm being filled with rage inside. I'm about to lash out at him. And then I realized, before I said a word, that this is a moment of blessing. It's the first time in my life that I'm able to see myself from another's perspective. And I realized that I have to listen.

And I decided consciously to hold back my rage and just try and hold the moment. And I'm looking at him not knowing what to say. And then I have a vision in my mind's eye of my son-in-law and my daughter, his wife and their kids, on a family outing, a tiyul in the fields. And I see that my son-in-law is carrying a pistol. And I remember that all the 20, 30, 40-year-old Jewish men carry pistols.

And it suddenly dawned on me that that's what those little kids are afraid of, those guns. And I said to Jamal, Well, what do you want? We carry guns because we're afraid of you. Then he said to me, No, you can't be afraid of us because we're afraid of you. And I was completely gone. What's happening? They're afraid of us? Why are they afraid of us? We're peace-loving people. And I was so confused. I remember just walking away from Jamal, not not knowing where I am, what's happening. So we met a lot of other people that day. Yossi Klein Halevi was there, by the way.

A good friend. He's been on the podcast many times.

Yeah. And as the sun was about to go down, we sat in a circle, 15 Israelis and 15 Palestinians. And Ali Abu Awwad, who was the convener of that get-together and the owner of the land we were sitting on, Ali gets up to talk in perfect Hebrew that it turns out he learned for many years in Israeli jail.

His mother was in jail, too.

Yes. In another two minutes, I'll say something about that. And Ali said, My name is Ali Abu Awwad. Thank you for coming to my family's land. We're from a proud Palestinian family for generations We lived in Kubaiba. I said to myself, What's Kubaiba? Then in 1948, there was a war, and we had to leave our village. Later, he said, The Israelis turned Kubaiba into Lechish, and I know where Lechish is. He said, The clan scattered, the Abu Awwad clan. Some of us came to Beit Ummar. We've been living there since '48. For 19 years, we lived under Jordanian occupation. Then in 1967, he said, The Jews came back during the war. And since then, we live under the rigors and the suffering, the difficulty of the Israeli occupation. And he said those two words Israeli occupation, and I lost it. What's Israeli occupation? I said to myself, What is he talking about? Where's an Israeli occupation? It was the first of my life, you may not believe me, first of my life, that I heard a human being use those two words in my presence. I'd read the newspaper. I heard that in the UN, they're always condemning the Israeli occupation, but I had never stopped to think where this could be.

Because when I drive on the roads of Samaria, when I walk in the fields of Judea, I don't see occupation. I see the return of the Jewish people to our ancient homeland after 2,000 years of exile. How could this be occupation? What is he talking about? And then he describes what it means to live under occupation, the difficulty. He talked about the First Intifada. He said his mother was an organizer, giving out pamphlets, organizing strikes. He said that the soldiers, that means my soldiers, came to the house in the middle of the night and threatened her. Stop or else we'll do something. And the second time when she didn't stop, they beat her up in front of his eyes. And the third time, they took her to jail. And she was sentenced, he said, to six years in Israeli prison. And then he grew up the next year without a mother. He described what it means to grow up without a mother. And then the next year, he was taken to jail. He said he was tried in the military court and sentenced to 10 years and not told the charges in the secret trial against him.

And I went to him, Ali, you're a liar. That can't be. We don't do things like that. But I didn't get up to scream at him because he wasn't giving a political lecture. He was just telling the story of his life very, very calmly. And I went home that day. I'm out of adjectives. Challenged, unsettled, confused. I remember pacing back and forth in my study, trying to parse what I heard from Ali, what I heard from Jamal, what I heard from the others. It just doesn't fit with everything I know. It can't be. But that's their life, they said. I remember getting nauseous and feeling actually that I have to bend down and pick my stomach up and put it back in because everything is churning inside. I felt like it couldn't continue with my life. The solution is not going to come from books. I have to meet more of these people. And I went back to the same place. I met all those Palestinians that day. And Ali was there with his donkey, and we sat around the campfire. And basically, I asked him a few questions, and he just talked. And Jamal came.

Shaul Judelman was there. And then, we were two Israelis and two Palestinians, and then three, and three, and five, and five. And we began basically to meet pretty often, once a week to the wee hours of the night. Elias Cohen, another name you might know, Myron Joshua, Ziyad Zabatin from the Palestinian side. We grew and we grew. The group grew. What we did would not be properly described with the word dialog. What we did is we told stories and we listened to stories. We didn't argue. We didn't respond. We just listened. And I remember the contorted faces of Palestinians listening to Israeli Jews and contorted faces of Jews listening to Palestinians. You hear their stories of history, of connection to the land, of identity that contradict your stories. It can't be true, but that's their experience. So you listen until it hurts, and then you listen some more, and you go home and you stew over it. You try and see, could there be any truth in what they're saying? You come back the next week and ask them questions. They say more, then it becomes your to talk. We listen until it hurts, and we listen some more, and we became transformed.

I'll just describe, and you can edit it out later if you need to. One thing that happened is Ali said that most Palestinians, not me, he said, but most Palestinians go to sleep at night dreaming that the Jews will disappear tomorrow because they know the Jews don't belong. The Jews are colonial occupiers. They're foreigners. Like the French were thrown out of Algeria, so the Palestinians will throw the Jews out. And when we heard Ali admit that, we Jews, it was really, really hard. And then I remember realizing one day that most of us Israelis go to sleep at night with the same dream. We'll wake up tomorrow. The Palestinians won't be here because we know they don't belong. We told that to the Palestinians. And they said, But we have no other place to go. And we said to them, We also have no other place to go. I want to try and just sit in this moment. What happens when you fully absorb the understanding that the other side really thinks they belong in this land and they're really not going anywhere? When you really absorb that, It fries your brain. You have to rethink everything that you knew about the past and about the present, and especially the future.

Because we all live in this fantasy that one day we will be here without them. And it's not going to happen. And that causes you to begin to re-understand who you are, not just who they are, but re-understand who you are. Another story or composite of stories. It became clear that most Israelis and most Palestinians, including us in the meetings, we have constructed our identities upon the erasure of the other side's identity. We are certain that we know who they are, and we can tell them who they are. The Palestinians, very, very good-naturedly and well-intentioned, will say, Judaism, I greatly respect it. The Quran respects Judaism. But of course, it's a religion. You don't need land. Why are you here? Go back to Russia. And Israelis, of course, always say to Palestinians, Palestinian, you know there's no such thing. You're making it up. You know that, don't you? You're just Arabs. There never was a Palestine state. So why don't you go back to Saudi Arabia? But when you listen to other side stories, of identity, again and again, you realize you know nothing about who they are.

It's ridiculous to think you can tell them who they are. You have to listen and let them tell who they are, and they may listen when you tell who you are. And it turns out that they think about themselves, things that contradict what we think about them, and they think about us, things that contradict what we think about ourselves. But there is truth in both what they think about themselves and what they think about us. And this brings us to what Ali called from the beginning, we have to fit two truths into one heart. We have to fit two truths into one heart. That's the way to fit two peoples into one land. And later, I realized that this is very similar to what my friend and colleague and mentor, Brad Hirschfeld, used as a title of his book, You don't have to be wrong for me to be right. We spend our time thinking this is a zero-sum game. We're right and they're wrong. And if it would be that they were right, then we'd be wrong. So we better spend a lot of energy proving that they're wrong. But it doesn't work like that.

Our identity, and I'm talking for myself as a Jew or Zionist, deeply connected to the land, it's true. It's glorious. It's legitimate. But it doesn't mean that Palestine identity in connection to the land and history is any less true or any less legitimate or any less glorious. And in this process of fitting two truths into one heart, what you do, and what I hope I've done, is expand myself, expand my identity. And I want to make it very clear that what this means is that what we do in Roots, and I didn't say the word Roots yet, but that's the organization we created. What we do is certainly we engage in humanizing the other. There, just like any good peaceful organization does. But it can't stop there. The Palestinians are not just human beings. They are Palestinians. And we, Jewish Israelis, are not just human We are Israeli Jews. We are Zionists. We believe in who we are. And therefore, the work of moving towards a peace settlement is not just about humanizing the other side. It's also a second story, which is what I've come to call identity reconciliation. Expanding your identity, not abandoning it or discarding it. Expanding it to include the recognition of, again, the truth and the belonging of the other side. Should I go on or is it enough?

Well, it's never going to be enough because I'm fascinated and I'm deeply moved. There are some things that you said that I find unbearably painful because in talking about what you would call your own narrowness of perspective, I've had those moments also, and I think I'm probably much more narrow now than you because I don't do this nearly as much as you do. You made a off-handed comment before about Jamal said that the kids are scared because the people with the kippot and the tzitzit come in and shoot the kids. And you said very under your breath, well, now it's actually true.

Yes, I said that.

And it is true. It brings me to tears. But we all know what's happening. The left knows what's happening. The center knows what's happening. The right know what's happening. The Jews know what's happening. The Palestinians know what's happening. The international community knows what's happening. Bibi knows it's happening, and Lapid knows what's happening. There are settlers on the West Bank who are literally doing what Jamal's kids are afraid of. And no Israeli government, not a right-wing government, not a centrist government, and not a left-wing government, has really ever put the brakes on that. They've tried here and there feebly. But when you said that, you said, Well, and it's actually true now, that broke my heart also. So the answer to your question is no, it's not enough because it'll never be enough. I would love to listen to this for hours, but we have to have some misgeret, framework, here. Here's what I would like to do. I want to have you tell us a bit about Shorashim, what it does, how it functions, what are the programs, and so forth, because as you and I both know, there was a student here at Shalem who's now a very beloved graduate who's very involved in Shorashim.

I have friends from LA who are very involved in Shorashim as lay people, and I know Ali Abu Awwad. And so I know something about it, but I think it's very important for our listeners to hear about it. And then I want to ask you, the last 18 months. We're not at war with the Palestinians near where you live, but we are at war with the Palestinians in some tragic, horrifying way. And I would like to hear a little bit about the degree to which what's happened in the last 18 months has either... Because I genuinely don't know the answer to this. This is not anything rhetorical. Has it energized the work that you're all doing? Has it made the conversation more difficult but more necessary? So what happens? Are people pulling away? Are you less hopeful? Are you more hopeful? So Shorashim, and then the last 18 months.

Shorashim- which means roots, in Arabic is judur, in English, Roots, is the Israeli-Palestinian Grassroots Initiative for Understanding Nonviolence and Transformation. We never intended to create Roots. Roots created itself, you could say. Looking back, we call that meeting I described on Ali's land, the Knesset Yisud, how do you say, the founding meeting of Roots. So it turned out to be retrospectively. We have created the only joint Israeli-Palestinian Community Center in the whole West Bank in all Judea and Samaria, and that's the land that I was describing. We call it the Dignity Center, Merkaz Karama. Merkaz is the Hebrew word for center, and karama is dignity in Arabic, the Dignity Center. And until October 7th, we had activities there bringing together local Israelis and local Palestinians, as well as internationals, almost every day, other than Friday and Shabbat.

And a lot of work with youth, right? I mean, there were a lot of high school kids.

So briefly, I'll say we had a group of little kids, 5 to 10 years old, that met twice a month. Songs. Everything is Israeli and Palestinians together. Song, dance, arts, and crafts, hearing the other's language, feeling the other's bodies, the other's smells. We had 14 different groups of photography workshops of middle school kids, Israeli and Palestinians. And I think for five years, we had our Israeli-Palestinian high school youth movement, 15 kids from each side, Israeli and Palestinians, all local, meeting together twice a month. We also had, from the very beginning, for 10 years, we had our day camp in the summer, 80 kids, Israelis and Palestinians. We've had photography workshops for women every summer, two different groups. We had our interfaith dialog groups, three different interfaith dialog groups, Muslims and Jews, another group, Muslims and Christians. We had a leaders group, lay people. We had monthly lectures.

How many people were involved in this world?

It's very hard to answer. Probably, let's say, 2,000, 3,000 Israeli Jews had been to three of our programs, a little bit more Palestinians, 4,000, perhaps. And then we founded two other branches. We also have a branch In addition to what I'm describing, the Dignity Center in Gush Etzion, we have a branch in the Jordan Valley, a branch in the Shomron. We have a very, very small branch in the southern Hebron Hills. So altogether, there were thousands of people on each side who have been transformed to a a certain degree. Very few have gone the full nine yards, have gone crazy like me. But certainly there's 50 or 60 or 100 whose lives have been completely transformed, and thousands have been partially transformed to see the beauty and the meaning not only of their identity, but of the other side. In addition to that, we host mechinot, the Israeli gap year programs. We host about 50 mechinot a year who to see our center and to hear an Israeli and a Palestinian representative talk about our works. For most of these really high school graduates who come, let's say for 99%, it's the first time they met a Palestinian.

For 80%, the first time they met a settler. And now they're meeting the two of them together talking with dignity and with respect. We have lots of stories of people who've told us, young people, two and three and four years later, how their army service and the rest of their lives were changed. Okay, so those are, let's say, the activities of Roots. We also, in addition to the mechinot, the gap year programs, we were hosting 200 to 300 groups from around the world every year, whether it's student groups, Jewish student groups, whether it's interfaith groups, whether it's pastors and imams and rabbis from the UK, whether it's parliamentarians from Germany or Australia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We also have done at this point about 27, 28 speaking tours of myself and one of my Palestine partners in the US, in the UK, in Germany, in Switzerland. And then October 7th. The work was shut down the first few weeks after October 7th. The staff stayed in contact by telephone, virtually. The staff began to meet in person, I don't know, two, three months after the war began. I remember one day I took my car to Bethlehem, and I couldn't go in because the army had put up these earthen barriers, and I wanted to meet my Palestine partner. He couldn't come out because earthen barriers. So he parked his car on his side of the earthen barrier. I parked mine on the Israeli side, and he climbed over, and he sat in car for three hours and we talked. That was really surrealistic. The people to people work was suspended for a number of months and then gradually began to come back on a very low flame.

Why was it suspended? I can think of a lot of reasons.

Yes, I'll say two. Number one, from the beginning of the war, to a certain degree, to this very day, the Palestinian villages from which come the members of Roots are under full or partial military closure until this very day.

So they can't get out.

Can't get out. They can't come.

Even though just to make everybody understand, they had nothing to do with October 7th.

Of course. Until this point, Beit Ummar, 23,000 people, has all its roads closed with a metal gate with a lock, and the army only opens it during certain hours in the daytime. To this very day, since the war began, if you have a relative outside of Beit Ummar, if you have a doctor's appointment, if you have university studies, if you have a job, commerce, everything has been disrupted. So that's number one. People just couldn't come. And people from Bethlehem could come. There were barriers, but less than today. I think they've mostly been removed, but they're afraid, deathly afraid to come. The second reason that our activities were and are curtailed is because of the closing of the hearts on both sides. The trauma, the fear. This was always there, but now it's just been exacerbated. And yes, in reference to something you said a few minutes ago, yes, there are Israelis and there are Palestinians who did come to Roots activities before October 7th. And today they tell us they can't. They're unable.

Emotionally?

Emotionally. I'll give you one example. My daughter, who lives in Efrat, just a 10 minute drive from Alon Shvut. Almost since the beginning, she sent her two kids to the Roots summer camp. I remember every year, her kids, my grandchildren, sharing me on in the Roots Run for Reconciliation that we did every year. And this past summer, we did the summer camp. We did. But I asked her about my grandchildren coming, and she said, I can't. I don't have room in my heart for it. And it's not something that people can explain.

We all know people like that. I mean, many of us are people like that, but we all know people who were very open and hopeful, who just literally say... When a person lives in my building, he's a Reform rabbi, a dear person who was interviewed by The Forward, by Jodi Rudoren, who since left The Forward to go back to the New York Times. But at this point, she was still the editor-in-chief of The Forward, and she got to know him very well when she lived in Israel with her family for a couple of years when she was working for the Times. She came to Israel, I don't know, half a year into the war, and he was a big peace guy. In fact, the first time I was ever in his living room, there was a picture of him and Arafat on the living room wall. That picture disappeared after the Second Intifada started. But nonetheless, he was really the real deal in terms of he really believed that It could be done. She asked him, Well, are you involved in any rapprochement? Are you doing any dialog? And his answer, I remember, I read it. I didn't hear it, but I read it, but it hit me so hard. And these were his exact words, "I'm ashamed ashamed of how much my heart has shrunk". So he's ashamed of it, but his heart has shrunk. And your daughter said it in different words. People in my family feel it. People in my work feel it. My friends, we are ashamed of it to a certain extent, but our hearts have shrunk. Not yours necessarily.

You've given me hope by saying that people are ashamed of it. Okay, so that's an opening.

Yeah, I think that shame actually can be a very motivating thing in human life. I mean, very often, shame is part of repentance. You can't really do Yom Kippur seriously and not feel some shame during the day. If you've gone the 25 hours and you haven't felt shame, you probably haven't done the work. And shame is part of therapy, and shame is part of mindfulness, and shame is part of just being a human being. So yeah, maybe the shame is a positive thing. Is it picking up the work of Roots, of Shorashim?

Yes. As the months have gone by... Well, let me add one other thing. I said that Palestinians couldn't access activities. I said that hearts were closed. There's another reason why we curtailed the activities after October 7th, and that's because we did not want to, and I don't know how to say this in English, we didn't want to publicize activity and do activities that would make Israelis think that we don't live in reality. How do you say that?

I guess, really.

We didn't want...

Everybody to think you've lost your minds.

Yeah. Because Roots is an organization, and this is something that differentiates us from other peace organizations, we work with the non-convinced. We don't preach to the choir. We're the only organization that is actually trying to work with those who define themselves as right wing, as settlers. We're focused in the West Bank, in Samaria, in the settlements. So we don't want to do anything that makes it appear to our constituency that we've lost our minds, even though we believe deeply in what we're doing. But now we have gradually ramped up things, not like it was before the war. We just finished before Passover, a listening circles. We put out publicity, and we found about 35 Israelis and 35 Palestinians that are willing to join this program once a week. For six weeks. Four Israelis, four Palestinians, plus an Israeli moderator, and a Palestinian moderator, and a translator, just listening, telling stories and listening. And now that it's over, we have very, very touching feedback. And we're beginning the program again, another round. The interfaith dialog has begun again a little bit. Right after the war began, 10 months later, we didn't do the summer camp that summer. But the next summer, that was like seven months ago, we did the summer camp on a small flame.

I guess you're planning to do it again this summer.

You know what? We have to see. We have to see. I want to. It's not that far off.

Just a couple of months away.

Thank you for reminding me. We're putting off the decision because it's really hard. Will the Palestinians be able to come? Will the roads be open? Will hearts be closed? And will our constituencies think, you're crazy. And if we ever thought to come through, it's we're not going to come now. If we see you're doing a summer camp in the middle of a war. There's a lot to navigate here. Okay, get me back on track. You asked me some other questions.

No, you're very much on track. Let's just begin to close by talking about the future. We talked about the past and your past and how you got to where you are. You talked about more recent past, about the work of Shorashim, Roots, and then the more immediate past with the last 18 months of the war. Let's talk about the future and just talk about Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger. Let's not talk about Roots now, or Shorashim, or organizations, just you and your soul. Where's your soul relative to where it was 24 months ago as you think about the future of this place?

I usually speak the truth, so I will. I'm ashamed of the Jewish people. Parenthetically, I'll say I think the Palestinians have to be ashamed of the Palestinian people, but that's their business. My business is my people. I'm ashamed of the Jewish people, and I'm ashamed of Torah. My mentor, Rabbi Brad Hirschfeld, says something very true, I believe, which is that religion is as religion does. Don't tell me that Torah is beautiful and meaningful and true, just the Jewish people are ruining it. No. If those who practice Torah, if those who have a beard and a kippah and tzitzit like me, act like many of them, I think the majority are acting now, towards Palestinians and saying the things they're saying, I'm deeply, deeply disappointed and I'm ashamed. One of the reasons why I started to walk around with my tzitzit tucked into my pants and not outside is because I don't want to look like those Jews who are harassing and hurting and killing Palestinians. So I'm in spiritual crisis. But in relationship to my hopes for the future in our relationships with the Palestinians, nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed. I know that there has to be a solution that is based on recognition of both sides' historical connection to the whole land from the river to the sea. And of course, that is based upon the recognition that both sides are a people, the Palestinians are a people. The Jews are a people. Both sides want to, need to, express that peoplehood through a certain degree of self-determination. Both peoples are deeply connected to the whole land from the river to the sea. We have to find a solution that recognizes that. So my vision for the future has not changed. And I know for certain that eventually there'll be a solution, a peaceful solution of reconciliation. I don't know if it will take 500 years or just 50 years. I think it's possible, not probable, but possible it'll happen tomorrow. There could be elections in Israel and a new leader. There could be a grand plan in the Middle East with Saudi Arabia and normalization and some degree of Palestinian statehood or autonomy could have happened under Biden. It could happen under Trump. You never know. Again, it's not probable, but it's possible. And if it's possible, then I have an obligation.

I have responsibility to do my best to make it possible. And I know that if I take responsibility and I continue to do what I'm doing and do more of it, that will bring that possibility a little bit closer to realization, and it will create hope among 5, and 10, 100, and 1,000, and 10,000 other people. And when you take responsibility and create hope, that hope that you pass on to others brings them to take responsibility, and that can create more hope and more responsibility. So I know that I could do something, and therefore, I have an obligation to do it.

I think all of us who are listening to you have an obligation also. And it is no matter where we are in the religious spectrum, No matter where we are in the political spectrum, you're an Orthodox rabbi, you're a settler, you're a peace activist. There's got to be parts of that that make our heart for almost everybody listening to this. But the result of listening to you is that we have to understand our responsibility, too. Our responsibility is to listen to you very carefully, very openly, and maybe more than once. This is a world that we don't often hear from. And in these days in which any ray of light is a blessing in a world of darkness, you've given us much more than one ray. So on behalf of everybody who has just listened to you and who will undoubtedly be thinking about what you said for many days and weeks to come, Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, thank you very, very much for your time. But even more than that, thank you very, very much for your soul and for being who you are.

Thank you.

That that description does not characterize Israel’s religious establishment is, I think, a proposition that scarcely needs defending. That it also does not characterize wide swathes of “religious” Israelis (it’s true of “non-religious” Israelis as well, of course) is also sadly not really up for debate.

What would it take to transform the pulse of Jewish religious life from what it is to something very different? Is it possible? Buried inside those questions are issues that are relevant not only to Judaism and not only to Israel, and there is a vast, vast literature on religion, moderation, tolerance, the tendency for religious passion to produce extremism, and much more. That’s far beyond the pale of our focus here.

So what we’re doing periodically on Israel from the Inside is to speak with people who do represent a Judaism of tolerance, of embrace, of love. We’re trying to hear from them how they got to where they are, who influenced them religiously, how it feels for them to be part of the wider religious picture in Israel, what they think we might do to create more people like them.

We’re going to do two episodes on the subject this week, today and tomorrow.

Our conversation today is with Rabbi Na’ama Levitz Applbaum, who is one of the lay leaders of a community called Hakhel. We’ve mentioned Hakhel here before, because the community is home to Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin and their children, including Hersh, z’l, as well as to Ephi and Oshrat Shoham and their children, including their son Yuval, z’l. Ephi has appeared on our podcast on several occasions, and we’ve shared a deeply moving Yom Kippur presentation written by Oshrat, as well.

Hakhel also happened to be the “synagogue” I go to on Shabbatot and holidays (in no small measure because my grandchildren are among the little who run around the gym where we meet, but for many more substantive reasons as well), and precisely because it does represent the very ideals to which I pointed above, I asked Naama if she would tell us about Hakhel, its origins, its commitments and about the unique path that took her from a very different form of Orthodoxy to this one.

Rabbi Na’ama Levitz Applbaum is the Director of the Experiential Education Initiatives at Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She has over two decades of experience fostering inclusive and intentional communities, designing meaningful educational experiences for teens, students, and young professionals, and building bridges between Israel and North America.

Prior to joining Hartman, she served as Director of Ramah Israel Seminar and Director of Education for Camp Ramah in California. Na’ama has been on the faculty of the Hadar Institute, Hillel International, the Schechter Institute, and the Dorot Foundation. She is a lay leader of Minyan Hakhel, a ba’alat tefilla (prayer leader), co-host of a radio show on Israel’s Galei Tzahal, and creator of a new podcast, sisters@war.

Na’ama received her rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Daniel Landes in Jerusalem, has studied at The Schechter Institute and Hebrew University, and is a fellow in M2’s Mabat, Senior Educator Cohort.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

We're doing a series of conversations with a variety of Israelis who are thinking outside the box when it comes to what Judaism in the Jewish state should look like. Some of that has to do with peace initiatives. Some of it has to do with forms of Judaism that are outside the orthodox mainstream. And today we're going to hear from someone who is within what might call the broader orthodox world, but who is a leader of a community that is very, very different from the mainstream of orthodoxy in Israel. And it felt to me very It's very important to hear from her and to hear about her community to get a sense of some of the kinds of things that are sprouting up in Israel that, to me, at least represent a source of hope and optimism for what this country can become. Our guest today is Rabba Na’ama Levitz Applbaum. She is the Director of Experiential Education Initiative at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She's also a faculty person there. She's got a tremendous amount of experience in fostering inclusive and intentional communities, which I think is going to come up very strongly when we talk about Haqqel, which is the community we're going to speak about today. We're putting her whole bio up, of course, on the notes today. But prior to joining Hartman, she served as Director of Ramah Israel, which is the camp, and Director of Education for Camp Ramah in California before that. She's been on the faculty of Haddar Hillel International, the Schechter Institute, Dorot Foundation. She received her rabbinic ordination from rabbi Daniel Landis, who, coincidentally, was the rabbi of my shul when I lived in Los Angeles. She studied at the Schechter Institute, Hebrew University. She's done a tremendous amount. You'll see all of the details when we post these notes. So rabbi Rabba Na’ama Levitz Applbaum, joins us today. Na’ama, thank you so much for being here.Thank you for having me.Let's talk about you before we talk about Israel and Judaism. All right. Give everybody a sense. People are going to hear right away that you have a very mellifluous American accent, but you're not American. So just give us a quick summary of how you got to where you are in life now.All right. Thank you for noticing that because I always say I may sound American, but I'm not. And so sometimes I do make those Israeli mistakes without the accent, which is usually more forgiving for those who do have it. I'm actually born in Jerusalem, seventh generation Yerushalmit, I take a lot of pride in that. I grew up in, I would say, just like run-of-the-mill, normal, Orthodox family. I'm the eldest of seven. My father is a rabbi and educator. My mother is a psychologist educator. We did move around a lot. As a child, we moved around a lot. I lived in Safed for a bunch of years, and then we went off to shlijut, my parents were emissaries in Los Angeles for six years. But really, hence my English. I came back with no Hebrew. That was a problem. I finished high school here, I would say, in a pretty right wing, Orthodox, all girls high school in Jerusalem. I was at Tsvia, it's hard core. Some would say that I'm at the bottom of the Midron Ha'Khalaklak, The slippery slope. Because I got my rabbinic ordination. I'm not sure that they would really welcome me into the school today.You're not on the homepage of the website. Correct. That is correct. I've learned a lot of Jewish text and halakhah, but definitely not on the homepage. I would say that really my career or my trajectory towards becoming also a rabbi, I really started as I was myself, a Shlicha, from the Jewish agency in the summer Shlichim program. I was sent to the Northwoods of Wisconsin, in Ramah, Wisconsin. Ramah is part of the conservative camping movement. Me being very young and naïve. It was the first time that I was really exposed to anything that was liberal in a Jewish setting.Did you know what you were going to?I was a little bit overly self-confident as an Orthodox woman coming to a conservative camp. This was right after the army. The fact that I did the army was also not in my favor with my school at that point.They wanted girls just so everybody understands to do national service. Correct.What did you do in the army? I was a tour guide. I was a for school kids, so definitely not a combat soldier in any shape or form. But I felt like it was very important to me as the stamp of what it means to be Israeli and to be a part of society here. I felt very passionate about being in the army and wearing that uniform warm. Right after the army, I decided to go and explore Wisconsin. And I felt like as long as they kept Shabbat and they could provide me with kosher food, I was like, great, I'm fine with that. And I was going to go off. And little did I know that that really set me on a totally different track as I came back.Was the first time you saw women participating in tfila?It was the first time that I not only saw women, but at the time, the head of my group, my Roche Eda, came up to me and was like, you're religious. You be in charge of all the services and tfilot because you have fluency and you have the Hebrew, et cetera. I was like, Great. I'm happy to give where I can. I have never spent any time on the other side of the mekhitza, let alone how to run any sort of minyan. And that was a summer that I learned a lot. And came back here and was angry. I was really angry. I was angry at my father for not having me learn any Talmud, never opened up a book of Gamara, and I went to learn. And that was my revenge a little bit. It's a good revenge.Your parents can't complain about that revenge.That is true. Today, they're very proud, but it was quite... Yeah. And just fast forward, this is where I'm at.Okay, so you're working at Hartman, you're an educator, you're a formal educator, you're on the faculty, you're an informal educator, you're in Camp Ramah, Israel for a long time. You're doing a lot of stuff with Hartman now. But we want to talk about this slice of your life, which is more your not professional life, but your volunteer life, although it's a volunteer life that I think takes as many hours a week, probably as your professional life. So you've just stepped out of the role of being the coordinator of this Minyan called Hakhel. But you're still deeply involved, and you're just over the line. Somebody else just took over recently. You did it for the last period of time, three years, and it was during the entire time of the judicial reform, which had its impact on the Kehila and then the entire time so far of the war, which had a massive impact on the Kehila. And we'll talk about that to whatever extent you feel comfortable doing in a minute. But before we get to what's happened in the last few years with this Minyan called Hakhel, tell us just a little bit, even though you weren't one of the actual founders, a little bit too young. But nonetheless, you've been involved for a very, very long time. My first, by the way, my first encounter with Hakhel was a Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur davening when you davened. And I actually wrote, I actually asked somebody, who is that? And I ended up writing you a little text afterwards, it was really unbelievable hearing you daven. It was just unbelievable. Elisheva and I both remember that day very, very clearly. But You've been around for a very long time. So even though you weren't one of the founders, you know it inside and out. Talk to us a little bit about what was the vision of this, of forming this community? Let's just give people a sense. It's in South Jerusalem. It's in Baca, which when I was growing up here in Jerusalem as a kid, while you were doing Shlechut in LA, my parents from Baltimore were doing a Shlichut here in Israel for a couple of years, it was supposed to be Aliyah, but it ended up being Shlichut. We stayed only a couple of years. But Baca back then was the only neighborhood my parents didn't allow us to ride our bikes in.It was the hood.It was really the hood. They said, If you ride your bike in Baca, you're going to come back without your bike. So you can't ride your bike in Baca. Now, Baca is too expensive for anybody to afford to move into, which is a serious problem. But it's in Baca. It's near Kol Haneshama, which some people technically call the force reform community in this area. It's near Shirah Hadashah, which some people refer to as the first-Partnership, but in the tourism industry, it's called the egalitarian Orthodox Synagogue. It's near Tzion, and we've had rabbi Tamar Elad Applbaum on the podcast before. So it's in a somewhat Anglo area, but it's not really an Anglo Minyan, but it's in that environment. So we're in Baca, we're in South Jerusalem. What was the goal of the people who founded this? A lot of academics, a lot of professionals, doctors, lawyers. I mean, it's not a run-of-the-mill crowd. What were they trying to do?I think every good founding story of a Minyan, this was a breakaway Minyan. There were a group of people that had Davened historically at Pelech, which is the girls' school. There still is a community there. And around the time that Shira Hadasha was already starting up, feeling like there needed to be some movement in the direction of including younger girls, whether it was singing Anim Zemirot, which is the last part of tefilah, where children usually will get up and lead that part. And, or women giving divre torah, meaning there was really just a push within Pellech to be able to include more women within Davening, and just I think there was a frustration for a core group of people that ended up breaking away and starting this Minyan, 19 years ago. Hakhel started, again, every good Minyan in someone's living room and ended up moving into the Matnas, into the community center of Baca. Where it still is. Where it still is and still will be. Meaning I think that part of the philosophy or the ideology of the Minyan is that it strives to be a place that is embedded within the community, within the neighborhood that is open to anybody who wants to come. And also knowing that we are not a community that is going to have three tfilot a day or three Minyanim and have a building that is going to be full throughout the week, recognizing that, as you mentioned, property is expensive here and knowing that we want to make sure that there's multi-purpose for that space. I will say I think that Professor Yair Furstenberg, who's one of the founders together with Oshrat Shoham, speaks about the fluid or the fluidity of the ideology of the Minyan, we go with the flow. And really meaning that, I think that what he means is, and I'm going to try to translate more into English, but we meet the community where they're at. And not to say that there aren't halakhic obligations and that we are definitely dedicated to a certain vision of halakhah, Jewish law. And we do try to stretch, I think, those boundaries in order to be inclusive, in order to make sure that we are also creating an authentic experience for our community, whether they are young or whether they are older. I think one of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we are multi-generational. A lot of babies in Shul. And also we just celebrated one of our core community members who just turned 99. And I find that really just inspiring.But it's more than a Shul. It always was more than a Shul. We'll talk about after the 7th, but it was always more than a Shul. It had a certain political activism that was very much a part of it. When you would go to the Jerusalem protest during the judicial reform days.It was like the Kiddish after Kiddish.Exactly, because they were Saturday nights, and you would see a huge percentage of people from Hakhel were there, and a huge percentage of people who were there were from Hakhel. They were not enormous protests, unfortunately. So there's a political dimension to it.And I would say a lot of the leaders of the protests definitely came from the community. I will say that as the lay leader at the time, now I'm just in reserve duty. But as a lay leader at the time, I think that we were very careful not to bring too much of the politics into show because we do have people that are from the right and from the left and everywhere in between, and to make sure that there was room for different voices in the room and recognizing that people are coming to the daven. And that was the space for people to come and do that.The space doesn't feel political at all, but there is a of a political electricity among the people there, I think, and they care. And it's also about even before the war, and we'll come back to the war in a second. But it's a community that does unbelievable things for the people in the community. Is that a function of the personalities of the people, or was that part of the vision when you guys set out to create, or when those people set out to create it? Somebody who needs us, we're going to be there. Every community says that, but very few communities do it like this. Was that part of the vision or did that just gradually emerge?I think it's a bit of both. I think that it was part of the vision because of the founders that created the community. I'll go back to Oshrat Shoham, who is just an incredible driver of so many, just projects and initiatives that happen within the community and a lot behind the scenes. We are involved in so many different Hesed and Tzdaka projects within the neighborhood that don't have to do with any community members that I'm not actually sure that a lot of the members know about. And making sure that they're supported whether it's the shelter for women that we are very supportive of and youth that are at risk, and just one organization after the next that she has really just pushed pushed us as a community and pushes the agenda forward. I will say that going back to your comment earlier, there is an unusual amount of academics, of people who really care about the Jewish people. You know, I always joke that half of Hartman's office is at Hakhel as well. And just there's a lot of people that really care also about the future of what it means to live in Israel and the future of Judaism and what that looks like. So I think that just naturally and inevitably, that makes way for a deep commitment to what it means to live within an intentional community that really care about each other. I think we saw that, again, I know we're going to talk about the war in a second. But if it was not dormant, but definitely the roots were there, I think that in the the last two, three years, that has really just been highlighted.Okay, so let's talk about that at October 7th.It's hard not to.But Obviously, on the 7th, one member of the community became a hostage, was badly wounded, and became a hostage. I'm sure that had a huge impact on how the community responded. And then, tragically, the community has lost another person since then. And people that have not been to Shul. There are weeks when you come in there, it looks like an armory. I mean, all the kids come back from the army, and there's all these M16s, and a lot of the, mostly men, probably not only, but mostly men are carrying a lot of pistols. I mean, it's visible. You feel the war. But the community transformed somehow after the 7th, largely because of Hirsh, but not only because of Hirsh. Can you say something about the leadership of the community and what the goal was? And some of it was just instinctual, probably some of it was intentional and conscious.I mean, I'll just start off by saying that we have a rotation, usually every two years, of two gabbaim or lay leaders that lead the community. I think that, looking back now on the fact that one I signed on for another year, but really believing that term limits are important and to enable other types of leaders to really come in to lead the community. At that moment, on October 7th, my co-gabai was John Goldberg-Polin, Hirsh's father. Hirsh was at Shul that night, the night before. As good gabai's children, I have four boys of my own, and Hirsh and my boys were, we were pushing them to put all the chairs away because as a great lay led minyan, we sit on plastic chairs. My last memory of Hirsh was just bringing the chairs into where the storage, into the shed and closing it up. Then the next morning, John and I were at Shul trying to kind of navigate. First of all, there were just sirens again and again. As I mentioned, our now 99-year-old young man was there on October 7th. I think that I was most nervous about him running back and forth to the shelter and getting hurt, but also recognizing that something was going on. I looked at John as we left Shul and said to him, Okay, we'll recap after Chag. I had no idea what was going on at that moment. Nobody did. We'll try to figure out what we need to pivot. It was clear to us that people were already being called up. I would say at the beginning or at the height of the war, we're around 200 families now, which is already, I think, larger as we grew through COVID. I don't know that one of our COVID keepers was that we gained a bunch of families. We had 130 people from the community drafted right at the beginning. Many of those who were drafted also sat on our committees So we had to really reconfigure our whole leadership and mechanism of how we support. And there were new needs. I felt like those first two weeks, there was this manic energy of sending all of the things that the soldiers needed to the front lines. And then starting WhatsApp groups for those who, we had thousands, tens of thousands of families that ended up in Jerusalem that came from the south. My sister lived in Sderot. She moved into my parents house in Beit Shemesh. I mean, there was just all these other, as you mentioned, we're a very socially aware community. So People were just pivoted right into just the municipality and social structures that spring up right on October 7th to help the larger community. We had to support our families that were drafted, whether it was young mothers with children that were left at home, myself included for months. There was this added level, of course, of Hirsh, the anxiety around Hirsh. Already on October 7th, the Goldberg-Polin's were just unbelievable and created kind of the working group that really started working on trying to figure out what had happened. When I spoke to John, that at the end of Simchat Torah, he just texted me back, We haven't heard from Hirsh, you're on your own. Luckily, we do have a group of gabbaim bemiluim, we call them, but the leaders that are reservists.Reservists leaders for the community.To try and figure out how to deal with the situation and how to move forward. But I would say, I think even that Sunday night, which was October 8th, I felt like it was just extremely important to bring the community together. We had our systems from COVID, and so we just announced on the WhatsApp group that we were going to get on Zoom at 9:00 PM for a quick tefilah together. We read for the soldiers, I don't even know if we did for the hostages that first one because who knew? And saying something together highlighted something, some initiative that someone was involved with. And that went on for a few weeks where we gathered, whether it was nightly or every other night, feeling that people really needed something, a community and to come together, and to something to ground them within all the chaos, because there was a lot of chaos at that beginning. And fear. There was a lot of fear.Yeah. I'll just say, personally, I remember our son was called up. He was called up a bunch of times. First time to Gaza, the second, third time to the north. But just in terms of what the community did, my son doesn't even live in Jerusalem. He's married, he's got his own kids. He lives in Givataim outside of Tel Aviv. But I think it was you. Somebody knocked on the door and brought us a cake. I think it was me. I just thought it was you. After you left, I thought, Okay, I really don't need a cake. I need my son to come home. Actually, that's what I need. But the cake, I don't know, it touched me. I still remember it. People have given us a lot of cakes over the years. But I still remember the day that you brought over the cake. You were bringing cakes to everybody who had a kid serving. It didn't matter if your kid was or if your kid was twice that age, which is what my kid is. It just was something about the community that, in general having nothing to do with the war. You mentioned COVID before. Those were the good old days. Bring COVID back. Exactly. We would be very happy to have COVID back. But we started actually going to the Minyan, the early Minyan, because it was much more sparsely populated. We were older and we had our little medical stuff.It was outside.It was outside. You guys had your little aisles between certain things. But I thought that was a little iffy, sketchy. So we went to the early Minyan, and there was this guy that we took two plastic chairs, and we marched them back in 20 yards, and we sat by ourselves outside, and it was very nice. And then this guy who was running the Minyan, who I had no idea who it was, comes up to me and says, I get what you're doing. My parents are doing exactly the same thing. I'm not going to bother you. I'm not going to ask you if you want an Alyiah. I'm not going to ask you if you want Aliyah services. We're going to leave you alone. And when you're ready to start moving up towards the front, you let me know when we're good. And every week he would come and he would check on us, just make sure we're okay. It was the sweetest thing. Like, after the third or fourth week, I didn't know he was because I was really new to the community. I said to somebody, I said to Elisheva, we got to write that guy like a note and just say thank you. You're being very sweet. We're Fine, but thank you. I knew it was. So I asked somebody who it was, and they told me who it was. It was Mikhael, right? Mikhael Menekin. Who is known, I think, among most people back in the day when he was one of the leaders of Breaking the Silence, which was kind of a controversial organization, it's more controversial now than it was when he was running it. It was very different when he was running it. It's an important to say. And then I reached out to him, and we've become obviously very friendly since then. I thought to myself before that, if somebody had said to me, there's this guy named Mikhael, and I knew who he was. That's right. This guy that used to run Breaking the Silence, and he hangs around in this community, which I think I have coffee with him, I would have thought, no. I mean, all the power to him, but that's not my thing. But the community enabled us to transcend things that otherwise might have been barriers and to develop friendships despite or sometimes even because of political differences, meaning that it's interesting to talk to people who you don't see the world the same way. You can be in an echo chamber anywhere you want. But the community really is very diverse, as you pointed out before, it really reached out to people. We're still in a war, and the IDF says we're going to be in a war for all of 2025, and now we're going to take over Gaza. I mean, this is nowhere near ending, tragically. And there's 59 hostages who have to be returned somehow or some way. But if you try to prognosticate a little bit, let's say the war ends and we go back to some normal, what do you think the long term DNA change in the kehila is? Do you have a sense about that?I'm not sure I know what normal means. I want to pause on that for a second because I think that we're all changed. I've spent a lot of time in the last 18 months stressing and thinking about how do we create a future for our children that is not only, because we're all in trauma, but there's not only trauma-informed things We're thinking a lot about what is the story that we are telling ourselves and that we're telling others and our children from this time. I think that that's a crucial question that is going to determine, I think, what the future looks like for us and how the community has changed. It's interesting because after Hirsch was murdered, September or end of August, we called this the Hirsh effect in Shul. We had a lot of people who were curious, and I respect that. John had davened with us all year throughout Hirsh being a hostage, and Rachel returned to Shul to say Kaddish for him. We were so anxious and, I think, protective of her, and still anxious and protective. To make sure that she feels like she is a normal community member and seen.And then she said that's what she wants.That's what she wants. Even just trying to manage people, just onlookers and people who are coming to also grieve with the community. I think that that's an important piece of it. We, very early on, started to take. There's the Ark out to the streets and really enabling the neighborhood to come and not only pray with us, but to cry out for the return of the hostages. We had an incredible event for the 100 days, when I say that as we are approaching 600. It's just unbelievable. For the 100 days, it was at the promenade in in Armon Ha'Narziv at the Tayelet. Before every one of these events, it was like Oshrat and I and the other organizers looked at each other and were like, Nobody's going to come. Who's going to come to this? No one's going to come. Maybe it'll be a few community members, and we ended up with around 2,000 people there just praying with us. I think that that changes community a bit. I don't think that we are able to go back to what we were. Just like COVID has changed communities in the way that we operate and see things. I will say that part of what we really made a concerted effort over the past 18 months is to hold on to what Tfilah looks like, what community feels like, what's normal. We wanted people to walk into this space and not feel surprised that they were coming home to something that felt familiar to them. Because Tfilah, I always say, it can also be a change agent. It can also be something that feels very familiar and grounding. It's cheaper than therapy, it lasts a lot longer, it's more consistent. And I think that part of the reactions and the feedback that we were getting from community members was just, thank you for just being there every week. And that was a source of strength for a lot of people, knowing that show was going to happen and that it was going to happen in the way that we always did it. I said, I think it was the third week of the war where I was getting complaints about something very random and normal, whether it was the length of the Dvar Torah or the way that we did something. I looked over to my husband, Ari, and I said to him, I was like, great, people are complaining about the normal things. For me, that was a win because I wanted people to really feel like that stayed normal for them. There was, again, so much chaos that it felt so important to me to be able to hold that space for people. You speak about the cakes, and I was getting a lot of pushback because everybody kept saying, Why do we need to bake so many cakes? Don't make any more cakes. I said, It's not about cake. It's about seeing people, and it's about making sure that everybody feels seen. It doesn't matter if their child is 40 in the army or if their child is 18 and in the army, everyone's going through something and to make sure that everyone felt seen. I think that that was my biggest challenge over the past 18 months.So let's talk about religion in Israel for a second. Let's just leave Hakhel specifically and certainly leave the war. You and I are having this conversation, I guess, about a week or so after there was this really, I think, horrific event in Raanana, where there's a shared memorial service people have been doing for many, many, many years, where Israelis have lost people and Palestinians have lost people get together to talk about their losses on Yom Ha'zikaron, which is the Memorial Day for Fallen soldiers. It's not actually a ceremony that I would go to on that day. I would be very open to going to something like that any other day of the year. But on Yom Ha'zikaron, for me personally, that's my Israeli Losses Day. So it's not my cup of tea, personally, but I certainly think anybody should be able to do what they want to do. And as most of our listeners probably know, but it was livestream, and you could watch it at home. But it was also livestreamed in a few places around the country. People gather just to watch it together, just to be online together and whatever. And one of the reformed synagogues in Raana did this, and the people literally had to be evacuated by the police who were warned that there was going to be violence and didn't show up in enough numbers. Who knows what that's all about? One can imagine, but whatever. And there was a mini attack on Jews by Jews in Raana for the crime, quote unquote, saying very cynically, of sitting in a reformed synagogue and watching a livestream. The event didn't even happen there. They were just livestreaming it. And then you look at other dimensions of Jewish life across this country, and it's hard to say that the official pronouncements about religion in Israel are the Judaism that you want your children, and eventually, you got your grandchildren, and I want my grandchildren to grow up with and say, that's the Judaism that I want. You don't hear from the chief rabbis ever something where you say, that's what I want my kid to be, or that sentence or that claim is going to bring thousands of secular Israelis running back to some traditional Judaism because it's so interesting, it's so warm, it's so engaging or whatever. There are these synagogues across the country. If you place them, I think, Hakhel is one of the defining ones, where you said there's a variety of political views, and we try to keep the space. You try to keep the space, space for everybody. It has a certain take on gender roles, and There's people who would be more comfortable if it was even more egalitarian, and there's people who would be more comfortable if it was less egalitarian. But somehow it makes space for a lot of people. And even if there's places that don't do anything like what, you just never hear a negative word said about another way of being Jewish. In shul, you just don't hear it. There's obviously extreme things that people might say are gross if Jews attack a Palestinian village. There's extremes. But by and large, within the mainstream, it's not a community that's critical of people. It's just about being, as I experience it, at least, it's tolerant, and it sees Judaism as tolerant, and it sees Judaism as fundamentally humanist. So let's just stay with the word humanist for a second. I guess my question to you is, as a woman who grew up here but has some experience of being outside of Israel, as an Orthodox woman rabbi, which is in itself a term that a generation ago, nobody would have thought that they would live to here. As somebody who's got her finger on the pulse, you have a podcast on Galei Tzahal, which is the IDF, Army radio, you have your fingers very much on the pulse of Israeli society. Can anything being done? The typical Yeshiva in Israel is not producing people who have that same set of tolerances about virtually anything, politics, religion, interpersonal stuff. The institutional, religious, educational places in this country that should be the repositories and the wellsprings of that are not doing that. I guess I wanted to ask you, can we steer that ship in a different direction, or is this the ship too big to steer? Can we imagine a world in which your boys are full-fledged adults with families of their own, where religion in the Jewish state, where Judaism in the Jewish state, has come to look very, very different? Or are places like Hakhel you think always going to be on the margins and swimming against the stream? And if that's the case, what does that say about the Jewishness of the Jewish state?Easy question.There you go.I always feel like God laughed at me when he gifted me four boys as an uber-feminist. And my biggest anxiety as my twins, because my eldest boys are twins, turned bar mitzvah was that they weren't going to count me for Zimun, for when you finish a meal and you say the blessing after the meal, typically there's three men or three people, depending how you count, where you can add certain blessings to. And that was my biggest anxiety, which is I'm going to dissipate it a little bit. But I think that first and foremost, I have to focus on what I have control of. I would say in general. It pains me that I can't actually move out of South Jerusalem. Because there's nowhere that I can really go and have not only a community, but to provide education my children that I am fully aligned with. Both my boys just study at the Hartman High School. It's just an incredible bubble of what it looks like to have a liberal take on modern Jewish life that is, one, committed to Jewish life and to Jewish practice and committed to liberal values, and that they don't come in conflict with each other. I will say that every time I do go outside of our little community, I have a lot of thoughts about what it means to be in an extreme minority, and we are an extreme minority. I think for many years, that felt very devastating to me and a feeling that I don't know, how can I continue doing what I'm doing when nobody is out there listening? And I have to say, I listened to a TED talk by a rabbi Benay Lappe, who spoke, I think this was already 10 years ago.She was a student of mine a thousand years ago.She's an amazing person who talks about the different ways that we can deal with tragedy or with what happens when a story crashes, for us. She reminded me that even back in, you mentioned Yohanan Ben Zakkai and what happens when the Second Temple was then destroyed. But the rabbis were a real minority, meaning they were not the majority of the Jewish people at the time. I hold on to that a little bit. That gives It gives me a little bit of hope. It gives me also the strength, I think, to dig into my values and not let go of them, to be able to say it's okay. It's okay that I'm a minority. I really believe in these values. I know that there is another way for us to be able to do Jewish and to stay in Israel. I think that there are a lot of liberal Jews that are asking themselves the question, how Why can't I stay here when we see what's going on in the government? This is not my Judaism. Ben Gvir is not my Judaism. Smotrich is not my, they're just so far from the values and the beliefs that I hold. And I know that as we continue to do the work, there's part of what I've had the privilege to do at Hartman is that I work with a lot of summer camps in North America, and I went to teach the Shlichim, so full circle back around to my time at Camp Ramah. But I went to teach the Shlichim that were going this summer out to camps, and I happened to teach the Shlichim for the reform camps, for the URJ camps. And most of the Israelis come with zero, I want to say, zero text study backgrounds, not a lot of Jewish knowledge. I had two Druze young women sitting in my class, which I thought was amazing. They were going to reform camps as Israelis, which I thought it was mind-blowing. I was so happy to then talk to them and just find out, you're going to be Shlichot of the state of Israel to this URJ camp. It was amazing. And I decided to dig in and teach text. I brought in the mishnah of about how the world was created in 10 utterings of God. And the rabbis asked, they were like, why did God need 10? Why couldn't he just, or why couldn't God just say one, create the world, and the world was created? And we had a whole conversation about the power of words, and they came up afterwards and said, wow, that's like a Judaism that I can prescribe to and that I can connect with. And I think that part of what I believe is my life's work is to be able to create entry points for people who don't necessarily have all of the access to whether it's Jewish text and/or ritual. I'm a big believer in Jewish ritual and what that can do in order to provide also our lives with meaning and community? And what does it look like as we continue to do this work? So it might be my tiny little small part in it, but I believe that we just have to believe that there is another option and to be able to continue. I will say, again, I think that it starts at home. I think that when you look at the schools around our area, my children are privileged that my father is now the school rabbi of the local school here, the local religious school. I went to the Yom Hazikaron ceremony in the morning that was honoring Yuval Shoham and Ner Shapira, both of them who are alumni of the school. I watched the sixth-graders, Boys and Girls, dance on the stage together and said to myself, I know that this is one of the only schools that belongs to the religious, the mamad, the mamlachti-dati stream that allows this. I am so happy that this is still here and happening. And again, the more that we can strengthen this school here and for it to be a model for other schools, and our unbelievable principal is now thinking about moving to the periphery in order to strengthen other communities. And I say she has now had an opportunity to witness what liberal Judaism looks like, even though that might not necessarily be her practice at home, she knows that there's also another way. I think the ripple effect, as long as we continue at it, is powerful.Powerful enough that we're going to be proud of the Judaism that represents the Jewish state one day?I have to hope. I have to hope that that's going to be the case. I don't think that we're going to be able to hide our faults. There's a great passage in the Jerusalem, in the Talmud HaYerushalmi, that talks about how the question is, what happened to the tablets that Moses broke? What did they do with them? We knew that they were holy, and what happens? And the midrash goes that there were two different Arks that were then that sat in the tabernacle in the Mishkan in the desert. And the one that had the broken tablets, the Ark that had the broken tablets, was the one that went out to the public every time to lead the camp in their travels. And I think that there's a strong message in that, we don't hide from our faults, and we don't hide from the brokenness. We bring it out front and center. We know that something's broken. Something's broken in Israeli society. Something is broken in the way that we are witnessing religious fanaticism and fascism, and we can use all the 'isms'. I really believe that. That redemption comes in a blink of an eye. We witnessed that after the Yom Kippur war when we signed the peace agreement with Egypt, who imagined that we would have peace with Egypt. To quote one of my colleagues, Dr. Tal Becker, keeps saying we are at the most opportune moment here in Israel. We have the Middle East in our hands. The question is, what are we going to do with it? And are we going to just take those opportunities and do something with it? I want to believe that there is an opportunity for us to be able to re-imagine what Jewish life looks like, to continue and believe that we have the right to fight for these values and to really give our children. I have to believe that, to be able to give our children the future that we really want.That brings me to my last question, but I think you already answered it, but that was I was going to say that when the synagogue, the congregation, the community, whatever you want to call it, had its recent celebration of its, every year, there's this celebration of its founding, this was the 19th year. Yud Tet. It's how you represent a number with Jewish Hebrew letters. That's what I was trying to say. So there's Yud, which is 10, and Tet, which is nine. And so that's how you do it. And then somebody, maybe it was you, said that Yud, tet, actually could stand for Yihe Tov. That's right. Things are going to be good. And then you did this amazing thing. You put things on the wall. I guess people what's up to you. You wrote out to the community, what does this community represent for you? And then people wrote back, and then you guys took them and wrote them up and put them up on the wall. It was really very sweet and very moving, I thought. In the little corner of the synagogue where I sit, so I could only see. I did look through them, but the ones that I sat week after week, they stayed up for a few weeks, and I was able to look at them. So one person said, This is the place in my life where there's sanity. Another person said, This Minyan is the second thing, if not the first, that I say when somebody asks me to tell about myself. I thought that was just unbelievable. But I want to come back to the Yihe Tov. It's going to be okay. It's going to be good. That's what you said. So this is like, you had 19, but it could stand for it's going to be good. It's been a horrible few years. We had COVID, which was in itself horrible, even though it did good things for the synagogue and some things for the world. A lot of people died, and a lot of things were lost. A lot of innocence was lost. Then we had the judicial reform, Which we thought was about as bad as it could get because that was, I remember it was Shisha Be'Av, it was on the sixth of Av. And I remember in this community that we're talking about, people sat out on the courtyard for reading the Book of Lamentations. And there's a few people who you and I both know who I literally saw sit down and start to cry, just started to weep. Had we had any idea then what was going to happen a month and a half later, we would have thought that what happened in the Knesset about the judicial reform was child's play. But then October 7th happened. We were sitting on the same courtyard on the morning of the seventh that we'd been sitting on when we were doing lamentations for the ninth of Av. It's just been a horrible few years. And I'm Almost a generation older than you, which I think makes a difference in terms of how we look at this. So I want to ask you about you and your kids. Do you have an optimism that your boys are, I'm not talking about them as individuals, but their generation, the kids who are raised in this an open, liberal, Jewish, Orthodox community, which is accepting and embracing of people who are like us and people who are not like us, who care deeply about Israel and its security, but also care about human beings, no no matter where they may happen to reside. You have a confidence that in a generation, your boys are going to be sitting where you are and committing themselves. Again, not them, specifically, but that generation. This is going to be a country that's going to be worthy of their devotion. Yihe Tov? It's going to be good?Look, my twins are 16, and conversations around the army have started, which I said to my husband, he better be done with reserve duty by the time that they go in because I think I also have a certain capacity.Meaning you can't have a husband and kids.A husband and kids. I think that'll just put me over. Which we do have families in the community. We speak a lot, I think, about also the ethics of war and what it means to be able to have room to see other people suffering, just the whole debate around what's going on in Gaza right now. I want to hope that my boys will be able to speak up and speak up for their values I think that turning away or we can't run away from these problems. These problems are here. If we don't have our voice heard, then we've left the arena, to the extremists. And I think that's my real fear. My real fear is that the liberal community is going to just give up at some point. We're all very tired. When people ask me, How am I doing? I'm like, I'm really tired. It's been a really It's been really hard 18 months. And as you mentioned at the beginning, there's really no end in sight. So what does this mean for us? And I feel just a very strong sense of responsibility and commitment to be able to imagine, Zionism at its core was an exercise in dreaming. We didn't have Israel when Zionism started. I want to urge us to be able to have the capacity, and I know we're all tired, so it's hard to do, but to be able to dream again, knowing that our dreams can be fulfilled and recognized. I want to hope that my children will have that ability. Again, trying very hard to on one hand, not normalize what we're going through, on the other hand, not having them come out on the other side severely traumatized, feeling that to be able to give them the tools of coping mechanisms and resilience is something that I've, again, thought about a lot like many other parents. And knowing that I have to continue this work in order to enable my children to continue living here. And that keeps me up at night, and that's what keeps me going. But I can't imagine living in an Israel that doesn't put my children's future first, and that has to include liberal values. It has to include a joint future with Palestinians because we're both not going anywhere. However, that may play out, and hopefully a vision towards peace, as naïve as that might sound. But we have to be able to imagine it. Otherwise, we're not left with much.That's beautifully said. I have to say, I think your boys are very lucky to have you as an Ema. And this community is very lucky to have you as one of its leaders. I think the State of Israel is very fortunate. It's people like you as its educators and dreamers. Our hope is not yet lost. One way of reading it is, I hope it's not yet lost, but it could run out. And the other is just, no, we just hope is our business. Exactly. And I choose to read it, as do you, the second way. And so for sharing this vision of Jewishness and Israeli-ness and how it's manifested in this particular kehila and in your own work, I'm very grateful. It's not an easy conversation. I can see in your eyes, you can see in my eyes. It's just not easy. But I appreciate you taking the time to share with everyone who's listening to this, your vision for what this place can still become. Rabbi Na’ama Levitz, Applbaum, thank you very much.Thank you for having me.

Already yesterday afternoon, the country was abuzz with the news that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had spoken publicly about trading an end to the war for the return of all the hostages. Later, in the evening, the government announced that Israel would be providing humanitarian aid throughout the Gaza strip.

Both topics have, in the past, elicited passionate and angry debates in the cabinet, but this time, the Prime Minister just announced the plan to provide the humanitarian aid, while refusing to bring it to a vote. There are apparently some things he knows he simply needs to do, and he’s going to do them.

What Trump has threatened, or promised, if Israel does nor or does do them, is anyone’s guess. But something is shifting. One cannot help but wonder what Donald Trump cooked up in his recent trip when he met with the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Syrians—everyone, it seems, but not with us.

Whatever emerges (if anything emerges), it could be good, it could be not good. Time will tell.

But if there’s any truth to these stories (and reputable sources are reporting them), Netanyahu has to be under such intense pressure that he’s willing to stare Ben Gvir and Smotrich in the face and tell them to do what they’re going to do (Smotrich is polling at not making it into the next government, so he has zero incentive to bring the government down; Ben Gvir is a different story.)

One day, this war will end. People feel it in the air. It might take a year, or more, but suddenly, it also feels like it might take much less. What happens when it does eventually end?

What will have to happen is rebuilding, of many different sorts.

Today, in a very brief post, we’re sharing two videos making their way around these parts that illustrate the sense of just two of the many “big things have to get fixed.”

The video above was a produced by a new “movement” (not yet officially a political party, but on its way, it seems) called El Ha-Degel— “To the flag.”

We have a podcast with one of its founders coming up very soon … I suspect that many of our listeners will be as inspired and impressed as I was.

Here's a Google-translated screenshot of their home page — Zoom in to read the

There’s not a lot that needs explaining (btw, since they produced their website, some very significant women have joined the leadership); I’m grateful to El Ha-Degel for their permission to add subtitles to the video for our readers.

Here’s the language from the middle of the home page (translated), in case it’s too small above:

Watch the video at the top of this post seriously. It’s clever, having Ben-Gurion having to witness the “sinking” of the country. It’s just a video, but it captures something that’s in the air here. New politics, new people, new starts.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

I was recently at a dinner at which the CEO of one of Israel’s leading hospitals was in attendance. I asked him if the reports about physicians leaving in large numbers are true. He didn’t poo-poo the rumors, but he did note that as his hospital almost no one has left, and even at other major hospitals, he’s heard from his fellow CEO colleagues, there are some leaving, but it’s not a mass movement.

Still, as we’ve noted time and again, the “lure” of America (but not only) is also a much discussed topic. Here’s a play on that that’s been making away around social media here. (I don’t know who put it together … if anyone does, please let me know so we can give credit ….) But the video is also serious — for this to be a place that has a robust future, it has to be a place that people don’t want to leave.

Many of the contradictory points of the video are true. Yes, many Israelis assume (whether rightly or wrongly is an entirely different question) that America is swamp of assimilation. And yes, many also feel (whether rightly or wrongly is an entirely different question) that they could have better lives in America. Some assume that those people can be lured back.

And now, as the last of the characters in the video makes clear, there’s a new question: who says that they want us there anymore?

Despite everything that’s unfolded here in the past two and a half years (since judicial reform started), Israelis still have a sense that, as Robert Frost put it in his 1915 poem, “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”

Israel is saturated with that sentiment — which is likely to fuel the massive rebuilding we may well be close to seeing.

One of the people who lives here said, “I’m very worried about our son getting called up. For me, personally, I’m not scared. I’m terribly worried about the future. And there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

I thought immediately that that probably captures the sentiments of many people here. Of course we’re worried. And if our kids have been called up or might soon be called up, we’re more than worried. For ourselves, not so much. For the country, a lot.

Still, really, where would we rather live?

As I was walking home from that lunch, I asked myself how, exactly, that sense of “there’s nowhere else I’d rather be” gets inculcated in people here. It’s a complex process and highly nuanced, but it’s a result in large measure of the countless inputs we get all day long, every day, that remind us that there are things happening here that it’s hard to imagine could happen anywhere else.

Today, we’re sharing three such glimpses from recent days.

The background to the photo above is in this Times of Israel article, an edited screenshot of which follows here:

Yishai Urbach, z’l, was married just two months ago, and was killed on Thursday. It’s unspeakable.

Though the injured soldiers are not named in the article, there’s a photo of one of them that’s making its way around Israeli social media (I don’t know who took the picture, but someone pointed out to me that it was also posted here).

It turns out that despite his injuries (I don’t know if he’s the seriously injured or the moderately injured — I suspect the latter, but I can’t be sure), he insisted on being at Ubach’s funeral. So the hospital got him set up for the trip to the cemetery in Zichron Yaakov, and someone snapped the rather surreal shot of the funeral that appears above.

The men standing nearby are, I assume, other soldiers from the same unit, who were not injured.

If ever a photo spoke volumes.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Galgaltz, Israeli army radio, has an extensive array of programs in addition to the music that it plays. This interview, with a Haredi soldier (who is called A, instead of using his full name), tells of his experience at Benji’s House, a place that cares for Lone Soldiers (those without families because they’re from abroad, or who cannot go back to their families for an array of personal reasons).

The emotional interaction between Hadar Marks, the (secular) interviewer (herself a much admired and very well known Israeli phenomenon) and the Haredi soldier (whose face is not revealed for obvious reasons) has touched everyone I know who’s seen it.

This is the original Instagram post, which appeared right around Passover, but we’ve downloaded it and reposted it here so we could add subtitles. There’s a bit too much slang to translate the subtitles absolutely precisely, so in a few small places, we’ve approximated in ways to communicate the essence.

Finally, humor is also part of Israeli resilience.

The issue of the Houthis firing at the airport, though, is no joke. The Israeli Hebrew press reported over the weekend that the Houthis actually threatened airlines that were flying to Israel that their planes could be hit elsewhere, too, if they did not stop flying here. Whether or not that is the case (it was a very reputable source, so I’m inclined to believe it), it’s gotten harder to get here and also harder to get out, and with El Al once again having the bulk of the routes to itself, prices have skyrocketed.

A band called “The Solomon Brothers” (they’re very talented—see their website here) posted a humorous video to Facebook about the difficulties of getting here and the exorbitant prices one faces if you can even snag an El Al ticket. (We posted the video above because some readers have had trouble with Facebook links.)

The airport incident was far from a joke. Still, it’s good to laugh. It’s actually astounding how much people here continue to laugh, given everything we’re facing.

When this is over (whenever that is and whatever that looks like), the story of Israeli resilience is going to be one of the main stories.

It made no sense.

Some thirty years ago (I believe that was when), Israelis began to address the need for a transitional period between the agony and the celebration. A new ceremony emerged, called a Tekes Ma’avar, A Ceremony of Transition, usually done by synagogue or neighborhood, which begins late in the afternoon of Memorial Day, with appropriate music and readings, and then moves slowly into a more celebratory mood as evening comes and Independence Day begins.

Year ago, there were only a few such ceremonies — now they’re ubiquitous.

To mark both Yom Ha-Zikaron and Yom Ha-Atzma’ut today, we’re sharing a conversation that I had with Justin Pines of JBS (Jewish Broadcasting Service) in New York a few weeks ago, in which we discussed what Israelis would be feeling today and tomorrow. (The brief Instagram video above was prepared by JBS and is a small portion of the video below.)

I’m grateful to Justin for the invitation to have this conversation, and for his gracious permission for us to share it here.

The Hebrew press on days like today is obviously all about both days—the costs of getting where we are and our hopes for what may still be.

YNet, Israel’s most-read Hebrew news website, ran something today that seemed worth sharing. It’s in Hebrew, and many of the graphics don’t translate even when you set your browser to do so (but some of the text will); still, you’ll get the basic idea if you click on the link to get to the “article.”

Here’s a Google-translated screenshot of the opening of the presentation:

If you scroll down, you’ll see the number of soldiers killed (the green bars) and the number of civilians murdered (the white bars) by hear. Scroll to the left and go all the way to 1948 and even earlier. It’s fascinating.

Remember: the screenshot below is a small portion of the graph. So go to the site and then scroll left to see more.

Keep in mind when you see the 1948 numbers that that was in a country of some 600,000 Jews, where today the number is closer to 8,000,000. This is the first year that Israel’s population on Independence Day has crossed the 10 million person mark.

Among other things, you’ll also find a graph of the single days (as opposed to years, above) with the greatest losses of soldiers (these numbers do no include civilians). Not surprisingly, October 7th was the worst single day in Israel’s history in that count. As you look at the other days on the graph, blue is 1948 War of Independence, brown is the Six Day War, and green is the Yom Kippur War.

This present war is shown in black … obviously not accidentally.

In what is an eerie coincidence, you’ll see that the deadliest day of the Yom Kippur War was also October 7 (1973), precisely fifty years to the day before October 7 (2023).

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

We mentioned earlier this week that we’re going to be presenting a few conversations with Israeli social and religious leaders who are advocating a different form of Jewishness in Israel, and in many cases, a new approach to our relationships with Arabs and Palestinians, even in the midst of this war.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll hear from Maoz Inon, an Israeli entrepreneur and peace activist, whose parents were killed in their safe room in Netiv Ha-Asarah on the morning of October 7th.

Maoz is a central figure in organizing the People’s Peace Summit, which will take place in Jerusalem on May 8 and 9 (information in the link above). Those who may happen to be here then and are interested can sign up on that website.

The following video is from their website, and will give you a sense of what some religious and political leaders, even in the midst of the war, are hoping Israelis can begin to think about.

Not everyone this will agree with their views, but regardless of one’s own positions, hearing them is important if we’re to understand the chorus of voices that make up Israel, which is the purpose of Israel from the Inside.

Reform Rabbi Meir Azari: “When Jews go into an Arab Village and burn homes on Shabbat, that’s Judaism?”

To a certain ilk of Jews in this country, of course, the answer is “yes.” They won’t quite say that explicitly, but their actions leave no doubt as to what they think. Their rabbis don’t condemn it, while some of those rabbis obviously encourage it. The army does virtually nothing to stop it (as was the case under governments left and center as well) and Israelis mutter under their breath that “this has to stop” but go on, because, well, we think we have bigger fish to fry.

We do, indeed, have many fish to fry, but I’m not sure we have bigger fish to fry. Many of our fish are big, and many require urgent frying. The hostages are the most urgent, but then there are a dozen other issues, all critical to the survival of the Jewish state:

* maintaining some semblance of a liberal democracy here,

* addressing the scourge of government corruption,

* fixing the IDF so it can actually win a war,

* dealing with Iran, the Houthis and all our “cousins” on all our borders,

* trying to stem the hemorrhage of medical and hi-tech professionals leaving,

* restoring some norms of civility in public discourse,

* making housing even close to affordable so young people don’t believe that the only way to buy a home is to do it abroad

* and many, many more.

But restoring / creating / cultivating a form of Judaism that is both religiously and intellectually serious as well as morally and ethically nuanced and thoughtful is, I think, also a very big fish.

So when I read the review of Rabbi Azari’s book, and then the book itself (which has not been published in English, though he hopes that it will be), it seemed like it was time for this series to begin to speak to people from the worlds of faith and religion, to ask them why they believe Israel has not been able to produce a moderate, ethically sensitive and still popular form of Jewish religious expression.

Today is the first of a series of conversations about that, in which we’ll hear Rabbi Meir Azari on his new book, “Lighting the Way: Jewish Leadership Brings Change.”

Then, in the next week or two,

* we will share a conversation with an Orthodox Rabbi, who is both a settler and a peace activist. And we’ll hear whether and to what degree his assessment aligns with that of Rabbi Meir Azari.

* We will hear from a man for whom the murder of his parents on October 7th has sent him on a spiritual journey which is not explicitly religious, but is very spiritual. He has a vision for this place, too, and that vision may well surprise you.

* Then we will head from leaders of what I might call “pathbreaking Orthodox” synagogues.

Then we’ll be able to compare all these different voices, determining which sounds the most convincing to each of us, thus enabling us to form an opinion of what must be done to move things forward as Israel begins its 78th year.

There’s almost no way all of us will agree with all of what we’re going to hear from this multitude of voices, but that’s the point. Even on this issue, Israel is a chorus of voices Orthodox and not, some religious and some more spiritual, some more right and some more left, some more hopeful, some less.

Hearing all those voices—with what they share as well as where they differ—is the only way to begin to understand what’s in the ether here.

Today, we begin with Rabbi Azari.

Rabbi Meir Azari was appointed as the Senior Rabbi of The Beit Daniel Centers for Progressive Judaism in 1991. Under his leadership, the Daniel Centers have grown to include four communities throughout Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

Meir Azair received his undergraduate degree in Jewish History and Political Science from Haifa University and his rabbinical ordination from Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He studied at Hebrew University, San Francisco University, and the Graduate Jewish Theological Seminary in Berkeley, CA.

Rabbi Meir Azari served as the Executive Director of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism from 1986-1989. He served twice as the chairperson of the Israeli MARAM (Israeli Council of Reform Rabbis) and served for more than 20 years as a Board Member of the Jewish Agency in Israel.

Rabbi Azari has published three books, the first an in-depth look into Israel Independence Day, its customs and traditions, as they have evolved in Israeli society. The second is an edited collection of articles introducing Reform Judaism to Israelis and Hebrew readers. The third book, recently published in 2024, is entitled Lighting the Way: On Jewish Leadership.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

A short while back, I had occasion to read in Haaretz, I think I read it in the English version of Haaretz, an absolutely fascinating article by Ronen Tal, who wrote a book about Rabbi Meir Azari's new book. The book is called "Leading the Way: Jewish Leadership Brings Change", it's only out in Hebrew now, we're hoping that it'll come out in English down the but the Haaretz article begins by saying, when Jews enter an Arab village and burns home on Shabbat, is that Judaism? The answer implicitly is obvious from the nature of the way that the question is asked. But as soon as I read the article, I realized that Rabbi Azari is someone whom our listeners absolutely need to become familiar with. Rabbi Azari has been the senior Rabbi of the Bait Daniel centers for progressive Judaism since 1991. For those people who visit Israel and do all the standard things to see, but have not put Bait Daniel on their list of places to take a look at, I urge you, the next time you're here, to go see Bait Daniel, which now has four different centers in the Tel Aviv-Yaffa area, a guest house, a seminar center, and so forth. If I say that, rabbi Azari has single-handedly built this, he will say that, "no, we did it with a lot of people", which is certainly true, but it is his vision, and it is his energy and leadership that have made Beit Daniel really an unbelievable well spring of Jewish activity, inspiration, passion, and so forth in a way that many people are simply just not aware that there are these powerhouses of reform Judaism in Israel. Rabbi Azari received his undergraduate degree in Jewish History and Political Science from Haifa University and his rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He studied in the Hebrew University, San Francisco University, The Graduate Jewish Theological Seminary in Berkeley, a whole a list of accomplishments that we will list in the notes and link to his biography on the Beit Daniel Center's website. But I wanted to speak to Rabbi Azari today, first, about the thesis of his book, which is that the Judaism that we often see coming out of Israel in the news, a Judaism that is not always open to women, that can be very hostile in its attitude to Arabs, that can cross the line in to violence and racism, and obviously, a lot of people feel that this government has fomented some of that, but we're going to stay away from politics, mostly, today. I want to speak to Rabbi Azari first about the thesis of his book, and then we want to talk about the whole issue of liberal, moderate, open-minded Judaism in Israel and the challenges that it faces. But first of all, Rabbi Azari, thank you very, very much. I know you're not in Israel much these days. I should actually say that you are married to Anna Azari. Anna Azari has had a long and distinguished career in the Israeli Foreign Ministry. She has been the ambassador to Russia and Ukraine and Poland, I think, in the past, and now is serving in Prague as Israel's ambassador.And in between twice, the deputy director of the Ministry.Deputy director. Okay. She's a very accomplished woman in her own, and is now serving as ambassador to the Czech Republic in Prague. And I know you're quasi on sabbatical spending a lot of time there, and your visits to Israel are fewer than they usually are. So I know your time here is very, very valuable. So I'm particularly grateful that you made your way to Jerusalem, I appreciate this conversation.I appreciate your invitation, Daniel. The fact that my wife is in Prague allow me to spend time and write this book. For so many years, I wanted to write this book. As you describe my career, in '91, I entered to Beit Daniel after a few years in San Francisco. Actually, when I studied in the Hebrew Union College, I never had the feeling that I will serve as the community rabbi. Being in San Francisco, meeting in person, the Jewish life in America, I said, I owe it to myself. I got the opportunity in '91 to open Beit Daniel, which is the first reformed synagogue that was built in Israel as a synagogue. Can you imagine to yourself? 91. That was, wow, that was a treasure. I felt that I need to be there. I took the opportunity and I returned to Israel a year before my family. My wife served in as the Israeli Council in San Francisco. I did a year of commute between San Francisco and Tel Aviv. You can imagine to yourself.

That's a nice flight.I said, Well, Israel needs reform Judaism. I grew up so far from reform Judaism, Daniel.Tell us about your background, It's actually fascinating.When I grew up in Haifa, in a secular Sephardic family, every Shabbat before going to a soccer game, my father took us to our uncle, great uncle, big uncle. We call it "Dod Ha'Gadol" in Hebrew, uncle of my father. He was like a grandfather to us. My uncle then, Dod Abraham, used to live in Haifa in a small apartment with his two wives. He brought them from Yemen?No, they grew up in Israel. I'm a Palestinian for hundreds of years. Ben Zvi, the late President, the second President, described my family as one of those families that never left Israel. Azari, the small people.But he married the second wife in Israel?In Israel, not in Israel the state, but under the mandate. Spharadic Jews could marry two women. Can you imagine to yourself, rabbis that I meet today in America, and the generations before them, march in every civil rights, women rights, rallies. They grew up in that environment, and I grew up in an environment with Doda Bukas and Doda Johara that didn't speak Hebrew. Doda Johara, I never had the opportunity to talk to her because she spoke just Arabic. Can you imagine the gap between my Israeli roots to the reform and the conservative movement? When I became a student at the Leo Beck school in Haifa, it's a high school.It's a very well-known Israeli high school.Well-known Israeli school, really one of the best schools in Israel. I discovered reform Judaism from Rabbi Bob Samuels, that came from America. I was fascinating. Wow, this is for me. This is me. Actually, this is my father, but he doesn't know that. I started my journey when I was 27 years old. I was elected to be the head of the reform movement in Israel. 27, young kid. I entered the office, and the budget was $250,000. Can you imagine to yourself, Daniel, What a failure. I'm talking about '86, '87. That was the investment of the reform movement in Israel.It wasn't that different in the conservative movement, which I was a part of.No, the same, Daniel, the same. Both movements are in the same boat regarding to Israel. Actually, maybe we'll talk about that later. I think the same story. Can you imagine this of the failure? I served there three years.So you're saying the failure was of American-based reform?Yeah, and invest in Israel. How do you explain it?I think they didn't understand that Israel will grow to what we can see today in Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv. They thought that, Well, maybe something will happen there. Yeah, but this is it was already 91.Yeah, but they didn't. After '67, when suddenly they discovered Israel, it was too late, and the leadership couldn't push the wagon. I think that part of, I don't know, to say a weakness is how late we came to Israel. By the way, we have to talk about the giant Abba Hillel Silver, that was so much part of the establishment of the state of Israel, his journey to the United Nation, his talk at the United Nations, his speech at the United Nation.Also the Biltmore Conference.Of course. Let's talk about Like Judah Leib Magnes, the Hebrew University. There are many reform rabbis that support a the Zionist story, but most of them put it aside, "Yeah, but we have to take care of our own community in this city and that place". By the way, Daniel, this is the story until today in the conservative and the reform movement. As a rabbi, you mainly take care of your community. I can't blame them.Well, it's much worse than that because in the conservative and reform movement these days, if you speak about Israel...Oh, well, maybe we'll talk about that. You're on very thin ice. Maybe we'll talk about that. That's why I visit, as you know, congregations for the last 40 years. A few times a year, I spoke at hundreds of congregations, reform, But in different places, I started to get the last 10 years instructions. Don't talk about this. Don't mention APAC. Don't mention J Street. Don't say this. Don't go to the left. Don't go to the right. Talk about Beit Daniel. I think that we miss the story. We're seeing the reform movement. I call to a revolution regarding to Israel. This is not that I'm saying to you today, "Well, let's accept everything that the Israeli government is doing", no, but we have to put Israel in the center of our movement as anti-Semitism, as the challenge of the life in America, the life in the world, intermarriage, whatever you call it in America. Yes, but we intend to put Israel aside, and it's a major mistake in our movement. Let's go to my life.I want to go to your book because I really want to go into the details of, well, not the details, but I want you to give some examples of the counter examples. But tell us the thesis of the book in terms of what are you critiquing in the book?A few things. The book, Daniel, was written to an Israeli audience. It's written in Hebrew. In Hebrew, but to Israelis- guys, you missed something. This is the main thing of this book. Judaism is a wonderful story, a beautiful story. Let's go to that story, but not from the root that you usually hear. The root is usually the Orthodox story. You hate it, you love it, you're part of it, you're against it, but this is the root. I said to Israelis, "Guys, it's more than that". Judaism is about progress. It's about change. The best time of Judaism was when our leaders were able to change and take Judaism from a disaster sometimes, or failure, or low points to, wow, to beautiful places. Take Raba Yohanan Ben Zekkai, the ability to see Judaism.Raba Yohanan Ben Zekkai, who was at the time of the destruction of the second temple.He was in Jerusalem. He saw what is going on in Jerusalem. He understood that the Roman will destroy Jerusalem, and he actually rebuilt Judaism. Judaism without temple, Judaism without the priests. He created the, not him, his generation created the Aggada, the pray book, the Bible, as we know it today.Do you have a synagogue that emerges from that also?Just name it. Judaism is not the same Judaism. Judaism that he created, Judaism after the second temple, and the one In the second temple, the first temple, it's not the same. The book is 370 pages of story of change, of story that most of the Israeli does not understand and doesn't have until today, without this book, the ability to experience, wow, yes, change is Judaism. No, usually for Israelis is "Ma She Haya Hu'Sheyiye". Try to translate that.Whatever it was is what's going to be.Moses brought the Torah from Sinai, you are not allowed to touch it. Ask a secular Israeli, ask the Israeli politician from the President down. All of them is stuck with that concept. The book, A, is trying to change that concept. Judaism is about change. Change brought Judaism to the high that we see today, who we are, and the present that you gave to the world. Judaism, it's about revolution. This is one story. The second story, I touched the halacha. You are told that halacha is Jewish law. It's always about change. I give to Israelis the ability to understand that debates, changing the halacha is part of our story. There's a book called Sefer Ha'Chilukim. How many Israelis, how many teachers, even rabbis, know about Sefer Ha'Chilukim? The book was published probably 1,500 or 1,600 years ago, tells about the difference between the Jews in Babylon and the Jews in Israel. They count dozens of different attitudes to Judaism, the way that we read the Torah.There's hundreds of examples of that in the Talmud itself.The Talmud itself. The book is about change and the ability to change, and they need to change. I think from an American perspective, reform perspective, it's offered to change the whole concept where reform Judaism or conservative Judaism was founded. You'll hear from reform rabbi or from those who talk about reform Judaism or conservative. Well, Germany, 18th century, 19th century, the debate is big. No, Judaism, as we know it. Reformed Judaism, as we know it, is from Abraham and Moses. They did reform. They and the people after them always were reformed Jews. We don't call it reform. Those who in the Talmud, the debate that differ each other, that brought different spirit that says, Well, no, we have to change it. They were reformed Jews. I take the book not just from the Talmud and from 14th, 15th century to the modern era as well. The debate between Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazic Jews, debate between Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel. The book is packed with hundreds of examples that most of the Israelis doesn't see, and the book is calling to them, "guys, open the book. Open your heart, open your mind, and understand that Judaism is beautiful." It's there for you. A secular Jew that says, Well, I'm not a good Jew because I don't do this. King David didn't do this and didn't do that. He is considered by many people as the Mashiach. And many others. The book is invitation to rediscover Judaism and understand that Judaism is about change. It's about to see the reality from a Jewish perspective.The idea that all the way going back, you would call these people reform, I think that in a certain sense, yes, about the change part. I think the Pittsburgh platform is a turning point. When the Pittsburgh platform says that the ethical halacha is going to be binding, and the ritual halacha is not going to be binding. That is a major break in certain ways. So I just want to put it out there because I think some of the people listening are going to say, "Well, I know a little bit about reform Judaism, and I think that there was a major shift", and I would just chime in and say, I think there was a major shift. But your point is that there's something compelling about Judaism that we're missing here because of what Judaism has become publicly, politically, officially, governmentally, and so forth. And I couldn't agree with you more. I'll just say, to me, the tragedy of the Chief Rabbinate and all of the roots that it has sunk into Israeli society, which are not many, by the way, because it has power, but not influence. I mean, It has in a certain sphere, but nobody cares who the chief rabbis are. Most Israelis can't even begin to name the chief rabbis. I bet you most of our listeners can't name the Chief Rabbi. We're not in the era of Rabbi Gorin. We're not in the era of any of the greats. But the great tragedy is not that they happen themselves to be personally very right wing, or even that they're opposed to roles for women, or they may say things about Arabs that make your blood freeze and my blood freeze. All of that's bad. But for me, the great tragedy is that they have communicated to the wide swath of non-Orthodox Jews in Israel, and some Orthodox Jews, too, a sense that Judaism is just ugly. And therefore, what it does is it takes people, like people that I know. I mean, lots of young people, my kid's friends, and students here at Shalem, and lots of people who just grew up without it, they have no interest. I mean, obviously, if you're at Shalem, you're here because you have interest. But the vast majority of such people have no interest because you want to say, what's Judaism? Then they look at that and they say, okay, that's not for me. And what you're saying is that's not the authentic Judaism. Something else, something that's dynamic, that's moderate in its core is fundamentally what Judaism is all about, and you want them to reclaim their inheritance.This is the book. It's a clear call to Israelis, as I said earlier, open your mind and heart and discover different Judaism. This is not Aryeh Deri. This is not the corruption stories that we hear again and again. This is not the spirit of Goldknopf and the settlers and establishment. Israelis are meeting the chief Rabbinate or the establishment of Judaism when they bury their parents or when they want to get married and they deal with kosher certificates. Try to hear the stories from Israelis, how they see, as you describe, they see the ugliness of the story.What's the reception been to the book?The reception is quite good. See the articles that were written after this book. See the reaction in the Israeli media, that's great. But again, the mission is so big, and this is just the beginning. The beginning is the communities that we, in the reform and the conservative movement, and the renewal movement in Israel are establishing all over the country. See the revolution that happened in the last 20 years? I will tell you my story. When I I have to Tel Aviv, to Bet Daniel in '91, I had 10 bar mitzvas. Beit Daniel, my community, my own community, small community, you describe the big community, it's a big community. We have 250 bar mitzvas a year.So there's five every Shabbat.Show me a synagogue in America. How many of them has 250 bar mitzvah a year? I'm doing an average year between 80-90 weddings. Show me another rabbi in America in that. You understand This is not just me. It's what happened all over the country. I said in Haaretz interview years ago, just build a synagogue, open the door, put a rabbi there, and you see the Israelis. The Israelis are looking for something. Most of them, if you ask them, they believe in God, they understand very well why they are here. Judaism is part of the story of Israel. Ask them, what do you think about brit, bar Mitzvah? Do you think that Jewish wedding is important? Yes, of course. Do you celebrate Hannukah, Passover, Yom Kippur? Of course. They don't have the channel, the avenue to find themselves in a reform and conservative synagogue. How many reformed, conservative synagogues were established in Israel? This is our failure.How many are there?60 reform and probably the same number of conservative. There are a few of the renewed synagogue. A city like Tel Aviv, that see every day around one million people entering to the city, needs to have at least a reform synagogue. You understand that the gap that exists there. This is a failure for the two major movement that did so much in America. Why your story was not brought to Israel. The book has at least two chapter that deals with American Jewry. The achievement that American Jewry achieved there in North America, women rights. Why women rights that was achieved there didn't enter to the Israeli society as a Jewish story.And small swaths.Yes. But women like Henrietta Sold, the women that established the women of reformed Judaism, the women that march in New York are shouting against the prices of meat, the belle of the civil society of America. Why we don't see that? Why we don't see the chief rabbinates in Israel, rabbis, marching as the rabbis in America, march for human rights, for the rights of almost every community. The book is full of stories about what was achieved there, how that was not translated to Israel. How come that Abraham Joshua Heschel was arrived to Israel by Dror Bondy like 20 years ago. For almost 50, 60 years, people like Heschel and many others were not brought to Israel. Why we didn't do that?Even rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who's Orthodox and so forth, barely making it enough.One of the leading thinkers in the Jewish world, I adore him. How come that our movements didn't build centers, education centers, the Hebrew Union College. It's not enough. We need to do more. The book is a call for you. American Jews that are hearing this podcast is do more. You have to do more. Israel became so important in the Jewish arena. Your Judaism will determine partially by what is done here in Israel. While the Israelis doesn't see your spirit, the energy, the wisdom that exists there, they adopt what they have. They adopt here Goldknopf and Deri and the settlers and Smotrich.They don't adopt it. They just ignore it.Yeah, ignore it. But when you want to hear a Jewish voice, you apply usually to those people and their rabbis. When the Israeli television will broadcast a Hannukah ceremony, lighting the candles, they usually won't invite the liberal, the reform, progressive, conservative rabbis. Usually, this is the call because we know Judaism is black and white. Being Orthodox, Haredi from one side, being a secular Israeli from the other side. The book is about telling them the story that you don't need to call yourself secular. You can call yourself a Jew, a full Jew. Judaism is not about the way that you put the kippah, it's more.Let me ask you this. We are in one of the worst periods of Israeli history.Oh, no doubt.It may be the worst, probably the worst. It's the longest war at this point, and it's not anywhere near over, so it's going to be easily the longest war. Do you sense that this war has created an openness to a moderate kind of Judaism?No doubt. What I saw during the last few years before the war, the years when the government tried to change the whole structure of democracy in Israel, brought so many people to the street, and so many people that understood that they don't want, they can't stand in our corner and say, Well, let's do our life. They decided to take care of themselves. Daniel, I think that most of the people that march in Kaplan, even before the war started, I'm talking about the judicial reform. Most of them won't enter anymore to and Orthodox synagogues.Was that about religion, the anti-judicial reform thing? Why did it change the religious worldview?Because they saw that religion became part of a certain fraction of the Israeli society, and they don't like it. They don't like the behavior of the chief rabbinate, the leading rabbis.Let me just push back for a second. I could make the argument based on what you're saying that they move them away from Judaism. Did it move them towards a moderate Judaism?It's on the way. It's a process.Have you seen an influx of people since the beginning of the war?Yes. The numbers of converts, the numbers of people coming to get married, the bar mitzvah families. You see and you hear kids. Kids are talking about that. I just had the bar mitzvah, three bar mitzvah that I conducted last Saturday. One of the kids spoke about it at the Synagogue. He said things that better than me, that I see Israel, and I feel that Israel is not in the right place and that I want to be connected.But how is that connected to the war?He learned from what he saw in the Israeli scene. When you go to war, part of the reason that you are in Israel, and you go to war and you defend Israel, is this fact that you're sitting here. Why are you sitting here? Because you're Italian, because you are French. No, because you're Israeli and you're Jewish, and this is your homeland. The story connected to who we are. If who we are is the settlers or Goldknopf or Deri, we don't want that. We want something that will be a different narrative, a narrative of liberalism, pluralism, democracy. The spirit of Megilat Ha'Atzmaut, in our Synagogue, Megilat Ha'Atzmaut is there.The Declaration of Independence.Yeah, it's next to Aron Ha'Kodesh, next to the Ark, part of the story. And what the Declaration says, we are taking the flame from the prophets of Israel. And where's the prophets of Israel. In their history, in the corruption of the government and those who doesn't go to serve in the Israeli army, this is the prophets of Israel that understood very well the complexity and the need to defend the country, to build a moral society. Where is the moral society? The behavior of the ministers of the Israeli government? Take the list. How many of them were corrupted? How many of them had stories in the court? How many of them had stories with the police? Israelis are not stupid. They're losing the faith that Judaism is the spirit, and we need to bring that spirit.Okay. I have no doubt that you're right, that Israelis have completely lost, or many have lost their patience with the right, the corruption. I think the hostage issue, as you correctly point out, is going to push some people even further away. I want to make life difficult for people like you and me for a second. I want to ask how we got to this place, but I want to ask about us. Here's what I mean. I don't want to blame it right now on the reform in the conservative movements in America, which did not invest enough in Israel. There's no question that you're right. I mean, they invested paltry sums. There's this famous story about the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1945 at commencement, just a few months after Auschwitz is liberated, Israel is just a few years away from being founded. The Zionist movement is alive and well. Abba Hillel Silver, who you mentioned before, the leading reform rabbi, is working night and day to get this thing going. And the students at JTS, which was the headquarters of the conservative movement, and still is, asked the Chancellor Louis Finkelstein, to have Hatikva sung, and he refused. So there's a problem with norm and conservative Judaism in America for a very long time. In some ways, it's gotten a little better. In some ways, it hasn't. But I don't want to talk about them. And I don't want to talk about the right wing in Israel who are exactly what you've said. I want to ask about us, and I want to make it a very wide us. An us, that includes Israeli reform Jews, Israeli conservative Jews, Israeli liberal Orthodox Jews, like in Jerusalem, the congregations called Shira Hadashah and Haqqal.Kol Ha'Neshama, which is more reform.I want to ask about people like Benny Lau, Rabbai Benny Lau, who was absolutely Orthodox without any question, liberalism is a key part of his Judaism. Rabbi David Bigman of Yeshivat Maale Gilboa is also a very serious Orthodox rabbi, whose Judaism is open and moderate in its tone and its reach. I want to ask about that whole we, from the reform movement all the way to these Orthodox figures, and ask, how did we allow the train to leave without us? How were we 75 years into the Jewish state? And instead of blaming it on the leadership of the reform movement and the conservative in America, we're talking about how ugly the Orthodox are, and I'm part of this. I'm blaming myself, too. How did we not recapture the center of the Israeli stage with a moderate, engaging, embracing, loving Judaism? And now what can we do to get it back?Let's start with the old story. Why? The answer, as I see it, is tied to the question of where the population of Israel came from. From where? Most of the Israelis came to Israel from countries without democracy and pluralism and without even the beginning of the story that bring that spirit to Judaism. Jews that came from North Africa, from Russia, Ukraine, and let's name it, doesn't have that ethos of democracy. Sometimes we fail to understand the Jewish history. I read a beautiful article once about the Jews in Warsaw. There were more butchers that serve non-kosher food than those who serve kosher food in Warsaw. Can you imagine to yourself? When we see the Jews in Poland, we see usually the Orthodox side of them. No, Jews were everywhere. When they came to Israel, they came without that ethos of democracy and pluralism, women rights. Who talked about women rights in those countries. This is one. Second, it's the fact that leadership of our movements didn't came to Israel and didn't take the leadership. It's the same story was that Sephardic Jews. Sephardic Jews, the leadership, the elite of the Sephardic Jewish community from Morocco, from Algier, from Egypt. They moved to France, they moved to other places, and they didn't come here. A community without leaders. Who was there in '48, '49, '50s, '60s to carry the voice of pluralism within Judaism? You can't give me a name. One name, here in Israel.Right. No, you're right. I'm thinking I can't think about anybody.No, nobody. Nobody. And this is a major issue. And then the third issue is the agreement that Ben Gurion led to some kind of a coalition that you built with the Orthodox establishment. Give me the power to overcome Jabotinsky and his followers, and Begin then and his followers. And I will give you a little bit of money and a little bit of achievements.You won't have to go to the army.Don't go to the army, 400 and, then the numbers grew up step by step. You lead kosher issues in Israel. You will marry people. You take care of divorce in Israel. You bury people. You will be the Chief Rabbi. Step by step, this investment of the state of Israel in that community became enormous. Can you imagine to yourself that Chabad in Israel gets from the Israeli government 600 million shekels, it's $180 million a year. Can you imagine to yourself what a reform, a conservative movement could do with that? Just 10% of that money in Israel. You understand what the state of Israel invest in those organizations? How can I compete in Tel Aviv with dozens and dozens and dozens of rabbis that are paid by the government, their institutions are built by the government, and the the maintenance of the synagogue, it's somehow come from the government. How can we compete with that?Okay, I hear you.Take another story is the failure to tell to Israelis that we're authentic Jews. This is a major failure. This book tried to change. A failure of our leadership. Again, we tell to Israelis, reformed Judaism and conservative Judaism was established in Germany. Many Israeli sees us as an import from America. Why to import Judaism from America? Why to import Judaism from Germany? Who needs Judaism from Germany while we are here, this is the Jewish state. Here, King David, just a few hundred meters from here, King David marched. This book, my book says, No, reform Judaism, conservative Judaism, the way that we see it was established in Israel. It's a major failure. I hear that again and again, go to the server that was done so many years by the Jewish agency, by different institutions, by us, the reform movement. How do you see reform Judaism? Import from America. We're not import. I am part of a generation of Israelis. As I said, I grew up here. I'm coming from a Sephardic family. I served in the Israeli army. Nobody can tell me you are an import. No, I'm an Israeli, authentic Israeli. This is the revolution that my generation brings to the Israeli community and says, Wow, we somehow missed this story. We have to bring this story to the front. Don't tell us that we are import. Don't give us the story that the only way to be Jewish is Orthodox, and the outcome is those who doesn't, the seculars. No, you can be reform, conservative. You can be part of Benny Lau community. You're no less than Goldknopf. You are no less than Aryeh Deri.What you said here, I thought was really fascinating. You gave basically three or four reasons that I've just never made myself a list of bullet points in my mind. I think this was super helpful as to how we got to where we got. A, you said an overwhelming majority of the people who came to Israel in the early years to build the state came from places where there was no tradition of democracy or liberalism, et cetera. It raises the question, by the way, for a different conversation, what would have happened if a million American Jews would have come here in the '40s?Israel will be a different place.Probably. Okay, so The first point was that those people did not come, and the people that did come did not come from democratic environments, number one. Number two, you said the leadership of the liberal movements abroad did not come. Third was the governmental getting into bed with those powers. Ben Gurion, by the way, did it not because he loved it. He wanted to show the United Nations at the beginning, and then the Americans afterwards that Israel was not going to fall apart. And therefore, to stop the right wing religious parties from rebelling, he just was willing to pay them off. He didn't understand, of course, what it was going to lead to in 2025. That was the third reason. And then the fourth reason was that we've made this argument. We have, with great pride, talked about how our origins go all the way back to Germany. But ironically, that's a boomerang because it makes you seem like you're an import, and an Israelis want Israeli authenticity. I think that's a fascinating.I can add another reason.Your fifth one.I think that Ben Gurion in his community, in a certain way, saw that reform, conservative Judaism is important, but we don't need them here in Israel. We will create our own story. We'll create our own story. We'll create our own liberal Judaism, our own progressive Judaism. The best story that I can tell you is the story of how we celebrate Yom Ha'Atzmaut.You have a book on that?Yeah, I wrote a book about Yom Ha'Atzmaut. My father died on Yom Ha'Atzmaut. I came to the hospital, and the guy from the Burial Society, says, Well, the funeral would take place at 2:00, something like this.The same day, obviously.Yeah, Yom Ha'Atzmaut, the Independence Day. I said, This is a holiday. The guy says, "this is not a holiday". I had a huge debate. How can you force a family to bury the father on Yom Ha'tzmaut? No way. I decided to write a book about the concept of what is Yom Ha'Atzmaut. Ben Gurion failed in '49 with the way that he celebrate Yom Ha'Atzmaut. They did an army march in the streets of Tel Aviv. The march didn't march, actually. The soldier came to Tel Aviv. They started to march, and the whole community ran and hug the soldier, men and women.Well, they had parades for a number of years till they stopped them.The parades failed. He said to himself, What can I do? He forced a group of writers, poets, to sit in the army base in Tel Aviv and to write aggada for Yom Ha'Atzmaut. He decided that Yom Ha'Atzmaut will be a Pasach, a Passover of our day. They did a wonderful job. He liked it. The army planned to distribute it a few days before Yom Ha'Atzmaut. Ads in the newspaper, to the housewife, how to create the Yom Ha'Atzmaut dinner. Don't forget that those days, you couldn't get food. It was stamps, so how can you turn the stamps to Yom Ha'Atzmaut celebration, no, special dinner. The guys that were in what we call today Mafdal, Smotrich. They came with Rabbi Goren to Ben Gurion home in Ben Gurion Street and he says, If the Agada will come out, we are going out from the government. The Aggada was never distributed. Ben Gurion, and I can give you a list of few other events, he tried to create his own ethos of Judaism. Different celebration. How you celebrate Chag Ha'Shavuot? How you celebrate Tu B'Shvat? How you celebrate holidays that were in a certain way celebrated outside of Israel, but now we are in our promised land. And what is the story? And you know what happened? Step by step, Ben Gurion said, Well, it's too heavy. It's too complicated. And then '77, new government, and the government that are tied more to the right. Somehow, all this journey to create a secular, a liberal, socialist type of Judaism just disappeared. The Israeli type of reform Judaism disappeared. I think that right now, as we asked earlier, this is the window that was open in the last few years that we have to enter. This is the time for reform, conservative, liberal, modern Jews, those who really care about what will happen in Israel, to invest in Israel, build more synagogues, publish more books, establish centers for education. Do that. The reform and the conservative movement are approaching to an election in North America for the WZO. How many reform and conservative Jews will go to vote? So few of them. We need to be there. We need to be part of the ethos of the Israeli society. We need to help us. You need to help You know why? In a certain point, the equation will change. Reformed Jews from Israel will help reform Jews in America, in the world. It will happen quite fast. In the next 10 years, you'll see that the equation will change.Well, the majority of the world's Jews will be in Israel in 10 years.Even reformed Jews. Even reformed Jews. The potential of reformed Jews, conservative Jews, what you call liberal Jews, egalitarian Jews, are here, not in North America anymore.I want to ask you one last question, and not about reform or I want to ask you about orthodoxy for a second. There are, as you know better than anybody, there are some very liberal voices in the orthodox world whose orthodoxy is not in dispute. I mean, Benny Lau, nobody argues whether or not he's orthodox. When they hear rabbi Benny Lau speak, they know they're listening to an authentic Orthodox rabbi. If they were to hear rabbi David Bigman speak, and he's much less in the public eye than Benny Lau is, they would know that they're listening to an authentic rabbi. He's a Rosh Yashiva, he's the head of the Yashiva, he's the real deal. Just forget conservative and reformed Judaism for a second. You, as a very astute observer of Israeli society, can the Benny Laus and David Bigmans of the world retake orthodoxy in Israel?I think yes.What's the platform for reaching thousands and thousands of Israelis to get them to rethink what orthodoxy means? How are they going to do it?The platform is the same platform for reform and conservative Jews to invest in the secular Israeli society and move the secular Israeli society to the right place, to feel that they are Jewish, no less than the establishment, no less than the Orthodox and the Haredi Jewish community, those to the right and to the world of the establishment, and to make sure that the Israeli government will allocate more to their education centers to stop the flood that reshape again and again that establishment that became, I think, I don't want to use the word cancer, but it's very close to that within the Israeli society. They need to focus on that concept. I think that they need to build a covenant, and I'm using the word covenant in in purpose with the secular Israeli community and with the reform and the conservative movement to build a big wave that will say, well, guys, Judaism is better when than what we can see in Israel. Judaism is better than those kids that are running in the territory throwing stones. Judaism is better than the corruption. Judaism is about us building a moral society here in Israel. Judaism is about being part of the world, being part of the nations of the world, trying to bring light to the world as the prophets of Israel. And I think Rabbi Lau, as Rabbi Sacks, as rabbi Hecshel, as we reform, conservative rabbis, have in a certain point, as you, we have the same agenda. We have the same world. You do this, and I do that. You pray this, and I will pray that. But we are there. So I feel that this is the time to build that covenant. And again, using the word covenant of those who wants to bring Israel and Judaism to normality.Rabbi Meya Azari, one of the leading reform rabbis of the State of Israel, the author of the recently published, Leading the Way Jewish Leadership Brings Change, out now in Hebrew, soon in Russian, and hopefully in English, not too long from now.We'll do that.Thank you so much for taking the time. MA (49:47)Pleasure. Thank you very much, Daniel.

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In the map above, you can see Netiv Ha’asara in he red rectangle just north of Gaza, while in the purple rectangles, you’ll find the names of some of the devastated kibbutzim we have all been hearing about for the past 19 months.

In today’s conversation, on the eve of Passover, the Festival of Freedom, Noam Kalush reminds us once again of the fragility of freedom, of the narrow escapes that many Israelis made that day, and how even though these people are generally not counted as injured or victims, they and their children are all living lives that will never be the same.

Noam’s story and personality offer a glimpse into not only what happened on October 7th, but into the resilience, love and wisdom of the people on whom we will all depend to rebuild the south and the country at large.

Noam Kalush is an active member of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

On October 7th his moshav, Nativ Ha’Asara, was invaded and he was stranded for hours, along with his wife and two small children, until they managed to escape.

He worked in the Hi-tech industry for ten years and now is doing his PhD in computational biology in Ben Gurion University. In addition, he is a published author and has written three books, and is currently working on his fourth, all of them in Hebrew.

Noam’s Hebrew books are available on Amazon here.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

A quick reminder that Passover starts this coming weekend. For the week of Passover, out of respect for those observing both days of the holiday at the beginning and at the end, we will be on a reduced schedule.

People who have been listening to Israel from the inside for a while have actually already had the experience of meeting today's guest, Noam Kalush. He is part of the staff of the Hostage Family Forum. And we interviewed two people from the Hostage Family Forum about the work that they were doing and especially the digital work that they were doing to try to bring the experience of Hostage Square in an online forum to people all around the world. That work is still going on as we'll hear from Noam in a minute. But I've invited Noam to come back and speak with us today because first of all, he's an author, and, you know, authors like authors. So Noam is an interesting guy who's written three books, working on a fourth, all fiction, all the creations of his mind, which is fascinating, given everything else that you'll hear that he does in a minute. And, and because Noam and his family actually survived the morning of October 7th, and I wanted our listeners to have an opportunity to hear another vantage point of what happened on October 7th, in this particular case, not in Kfar Aza, not in Nir Oz, not in Beeri, but in a place called Netiv Ha'Asara, which is towards the north part of the. Of the Gaza Strip. And we'll hear about his story as well. So, Noam, first of all, thank you so much for coming back to have another conversation.Thank you for inviting me.And let's start by having you just remind everybody who you are. We'll go into a little bit more detail this time about yourself.Sure. So I'm, first of all, I'm the father of two sweet children, boy and a daughter. And Professionally, I'm a PhD student in the field of computational biology in Bar Ilan University.What is it? Computational biology?Computational biology.Like, okay, so in one sentence, for a total amateur, what does that mean?So, first of all, my background, my bachelor, my master's degree are in mathematics and computer science, but more to the theory of computer science. And what I do in computational biology is trying to harness methodologies and theories for mathematics and computer science to better understand or even possibly affect the functionalities of, let's say, the human cell or any biological process. So this really in a nutshell.Okay. And your inclination is more towards academia or more towards the world of actually industry and so forth?I think more to the academia or to the theory.And how far along are you in this?I'm pretty much in the beginning. I started in 2022, and then the last year, due to the events of October 7th and the fact that we were evacuated to temporary housing in Tel Aviv. Let's say that for a year afterwards the studies were put on hold. Only in the past few months I managed to get back to it. So I'm in the second year.Okay, so you're working with the hostage family forum still. You are a father of two kids, a boy and a girl, and you're working on this PhD. We're going to come back to your books in a little bit. How you find time for all of this, I have to say, is a little bit mind boggling, but we'll talk about that. Okay, we can talk about that as well. But I want to hear more about you. So tell us about you and your wife, where you're from in Israel, how you ended up in Netiv Ha'Asara. Give us some background, a little bit also about Netiv Ha'Asara, but you can give us more of your own background.So Netiv Ha'Asara. I would say that I was born, my wife as well, by the way, we were both born in Sinai when it was part of Israel. Yeah. She lived in the former Netiv Ha'Asara, which was a moshav, a village there.Where was it in the Sinai?Ah, well, I'm not sure exactly. I think in the northern part, I think, but I'm not sure.Okay.I was a year and a half old when they evacuated, so I don't remember it. I was in another village and, and both our families eventually stayed in Gaza's envelope. Her family and the other community members reestablished Netiv Ha'Asara in Gaza's envelope. My family and other members established a new place called Ein Ha'Besor, a new village which is not so new now. It's 40 years old, and we lived there ever since. Of course we moved all around, you know, we were in the army, we lived in the center. And after we married and it was 2014, my wife was about to give birth to our daughter. We moved to Netiv Ha'Asara next to her parents, we get some help. It was right after Tzuk Eitan, a very massive military operation. And we thought we'll have a year, two years of, you know, of quiet. So it wasn't, it didn't take too long until they started launching missile, but still we said it's a good opportunity. And you asked what was the origin of the name. Back in 69' there was a chopper accident where 10 Israeli soldiers were killed. So the original village in Sinai was named after them. And of course they kept the name of the one that is in Gaza's envelope.Yeah. A lot of people may be interested in knowing that there's a lot of places in Israel, that if they have a number in them, in the name of the town, the number is usually the number of people who fell. For those who don't want to spend time looking at it now and online, you can see that it's on the line, the line that runs east, west at the very top of the Gaza Strip. So it's north of Jabalia, basically. Jabalia is probably, I guess, or Beit Lahia, the biggest Arab towns in Gaza near it. And it's the southernmost Israeli town on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip. So it's not in the Gaza envelope where most people think of it as on the being on the east side of Gaza. This is on the north side of Gaza.Right, right, right on the northern border.And so you guys moved to Netiv Ha'Asara in what year again?2014.So that right after the 2014 dust up with Hamas, which back then we thought was a terrible situation, we just didn't have what to compare it to nine years later, of course, which was much more horrible. So now you said that your son, your daughter was. Was your son or your daughter?My daughter.Your daughter is the oldest one.So she was born in December 2014.So she was eight. She was eight.She was eight. And your son was four. Four. All right. And you were all home in Netiv Ha'Asara. Right?yeah. We were home.Okay, so everybody says 6:29. Right? That's the time that everybody talks about in Israel. 6:29 was when the Nova party was invaded by missiles. 6:29 was when people came across the border. But not everything happened to everybody at 6:29. They got to other places later. So if you don't mind, and I'm sure you've done it before, and I'm sure it's not easy, but still, if you can kind of describe for us either the night of the 6th, because it was a chag, it was a holiday. So who was there? And then how things unfolded on the morning of October 7th.So I want to talk first about October 3. Everybody talks about October 7. I want to talk about October 3 to start with October 3, because everybody asks how can it be that the Hamas fooled us and our intelligence didn't understand that they're going to attack us, and how didn't we see the signs? And, you know, I don't understand this notion because they did it in the open. They trained in the open. They didn't even hide the fact that they are going to attack us. They said it, they claimed it. And on October 3rd, Tuesday, four days before October 7th, I think it was 10:00 am, I was in the backyard and I suddenly heard a very unusual and very high volume sound, I didn't understand what it was. It wasn't an explosion. Explosions we are accustomed to.Right.This was very weird.What did it sound like? I mean, what did you think it was?I thought that someone is, you know, on the ceilings, like on the. On the above, but then my wife, she was in the kitchen and she told me, come have a look. And I looked. We have like a very wide window, like you have a view to the entire shoreline from Gaza to Ashkelon. And we saw missiles being launched right from next to our fence of the village, towards the sea, but right from the fence.And so the direction away from Israel. Away from Israel, but clearly a practice of some sort.Yeah, and that was very unusual. Extremely unusual because during the years we were there and before that, of course, they were training on a regular basis. We were accustomed to that, but they never ever did it from our fence. So I went outside to try to understand what I see. And I heard gunshots and explosions. I saw pickup trucks and I saw motorcycles. I heard them as well. And at that point I didn't understand what I'm looking at and what I'm hearing. Of course, now looking at it backwards, I understand it was like the last rehearsal before October 7th. They probably practicing conquering a military base or an Israeli village. The community's WhatsApp group was buzzing.What's the population of Netiv Ha'Asara?We have around 1,000 members and I don't know, 200, 300 residents that rents apartments. So you could say 1,200 people, and everybody were asking what's going on? It never happened before. And the answer we got is it's a standard training by Hamas militants.Who'd you get that answer from?Our chief of security asked the military, and this is the answer he got. This phrase. And we were furious. I mean, what do you mean standard training? I mean, how it came to the point that you let them train on our fence.Well, also, you knew that that was wrong because you've lived there for 10 years and you've never seen it before.Yeah.So it was obviously not standard training.Even if you say it is standard training, they just need to change the direction of the launchers and shoot at us. They just need to decide, you know what, let's cut the fence and storm into the village. We are furious, but that was the mentality. This is what I want to talk first about October 3rd, to make people understand about the mentality. That was prior to October 7th in Israel, now going to October 7th. So, yeah, so 6:29, the first alarm was set off and my wife, me and our daughter ran to the safe room. Our kid sleeps there. It's his room because it's small. We want him to sleep every night there. And right from the first minutes, you find yourself in a very, extremely intense rocket attack, very unusual.On Netiv Ha'Asara.On Netiv Ha'Asara. This is what we felt, but I understood that this kind of attack is probably on the entire area of envelope.You knew that?I assumed so for the rockets.Yeah.And we didn't know what, why did it happen? Sometimes there are things happens during night time in Gaza or in the west bank and there is a very unproportional response from Gaza, we didn't understand, but it was very extreme, even for unproportional responses. And 20 minutes later we started hearing the automatic gunshots sounds. And we understand it's a combined attack. There are also terrorists at least trying to get into the village.How did you know that it was terrorists and not IDF forces?No, we didn't. We heard gunshots. So we understand there is a battle. So he said, okay, I thought at that point they're trying to come from the greenhouses, from the fields to the village. Maybe they faced the civilian troop of the village, maybe they faced soldiers and they're exchanging fire. And at this point you're in the mamad, right? You're in this and you've closed the metal thing over the window.Yeah, of course it's closed every night, just in case.So it's pitch black?No, we have Electricity, actually.And you had not lost electricity yet?Yeah, we did. The entire village lost electricity, but there are emergency generators, so some of them worked in our neighborhood, we had electricity the entire day, but we were locked. And when we heard the gunshots, me and my wife instantly understood what's going on. So I ran to bring the cell phones because we didn't have the opportunity to bring it when the first alarm set off, because, you know, we have an emergency app, and we have our community WhatsApp group, so we want to keep updated. And in the first hour, we still had communication. We still had Internet, we still had cellular. After that, it collapsed. So quite instantly, we started seeing messages in the WhatsApp community group. People started writing that they hear people shouting in Arabic in the backyards. And we said, they're probably confusing. There's so many noises and explosions and the alarms. It can't be that they are inside the village. And then someone said, I hear them trying to break into my house. I hear the glasses of the windows shattering. And we said, still, maybe they're panicked. Maybe. Who knows? Maybe some rocket fell and shattered the windows.Did you think about October 3rd, when all of this was happening at that point?At that point, no, I didn't.And this is about the same time as everybody else, 6:29-7:00?That was already, I would say, 6:57 am that point. But then people said, "they're in my house", "they're trying to open my safe room door" I'm fighting on the door, they're gonna kill me".Help me remind people, I keep interrupting you, and I'm sorry about that, but people have to be reminded that the safe room doors don't have locks, or at least did not used to have locks. Now they've changed the law, they have locks. But the safe room doors were to guard against shrapnel. I mean, originally they were against Saddam Hussein's gasses, which is why they were meant to be airtight. But then we didn't have the Saddam Hussein problem anymore, so people started drilling holes in their walls so they could run water and electricity and make it into bedrooms and laundry rooms and whatever, because that still makes it safe from shrapnel. And you close the metal thing over the window and you close the door and you're okay because nobody thinks that there's going to be a human being on the other side of the door trying to open the handle.Right.So you hear from people now just to go back to where you are, that they're actually, basically arm wrestling going on. The people inside trying to hold it locked. People outside are trying to hold it, and get it open.Yeah, exactly. And it's terrible feeling. And you're helpless because first of all, the intensity of the missiles attack is, is crazy. So you can't go out. And at that point you understand there are terrorists within the neighborhoods of the village and you don't know exactly where and how many. So you can go to another neighborhood and try to hold them. And it's terrible feeling, but that was the situation.How are your kids at this point?They were pretty calm. My kids didn't know anything about terrorists, about people getting hurt or killed in the moshav for the entire day. And for the rest of the days, the week after October 7th, we were isolated them from any news, anything, until we understood how can we slowly and gently, you know, bring them the news of what is happening. So they didn't know. They knew, of course. They heard the, the explosions and the alarms and everything.What did they do? They just sat there?They know, it's not the first time. It happened a lot during the last, the 10 days prior to October 7th. And they know this is the safe room, so we're safe there. Which is not entirely true. This is what we tell them. We know if it suffers a direct heat we might die, but the probability is almost practically zero that it will happen. And we tell them it's safe here, we are fine. And we kept a very calm atmosphere, my wife and myself, so they, they felt they're safe.What does she do, by the way?She works in the High Tech industry for years now. She analyzes information systems.And yeah, it's a numbers family, we shall say.Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, so we were there and we understand the situation. And then after an hour or so or before that, I would say that I said, I understood that this missiles launch attack is all over. But the situation that terrorists broke into the village, I thought it's an isolated event, it happens only in Netiv Ha'Asara. This is what I thought, and when I brought the cell phones from my bedroom, I already saw that my mom and my sister called us. They live in en Ein Ha'Besor, as I said, it's another place in Gaza's envelope. And unlike Netiv Ha'Asara, which is on the border, Ein Ha'Besor is about four miles away from the border. And I don't know how to explain that, but during the last 20 years, in all the escalations and the military operations, when they were launching rockets, in Ein Ha'Besor nothing happened. It was very peaceful there. So when I got to the safe room, I wrote them, we're okay, we're inside the safe room. Of course, I didn't mention anything about terrorists. I didn't see a point of my mentioning it. And I said, we can't talk because the kids are with us, we're fine. I didn't even think about asking what's going on in an Ein Ha'Besor. Fifteen minutes later, my nephew, who lives in the center.By center you mean Tel Aviv area?Yeah. Asked in our family's WhatsApp group what's going on in Ein Ha'Besor, and my father replied that there are battles in the front and in the back gates of the village, which they came, the terrorists, with vehicles and motorcycles, and then it dawned on me that if they managed to reach Ein Ha'Besor with vehicles and motorcycles, they're all around. I started to understand the scale of the event still. I didn't understand the full scale. It took days.Okay, Because Ein Ha'Besor is pass Nir Oz. I mean, you basically you, pass Nir Oz going from Gaza to Ein Ha'Besor, so you're quite a ways in. So at that point, what time are we now would you say when you realized that this was a wider attack? What time are we?Half past seven? I would say something like that. 7:30, 7:40 am.And is there a WhatsApp group of the entire Gaza envelope or the only WhatsApp group that you had was Netiv Ha'Asara?Only Netiv Ha'Asara.There's no WhatsApp group there. I mean, obviously it would be a huge group, but I mean, yeah, some kind of communication of news between communities. So I had communication with my family, which is in Ein Ha'Besor. You know, people have friends and families in other places and of course, people who is responsible for the security of the village has connection with other colleagues in other places, but there is no one group. And it's good because it would be hectic.Okay, so you're in the. You're in the room at 7:30ish, let's say you're beginning to get this impression that, okay, this is a much bigger deal than I thought. You and your wife, your daughter, your son, cell phones chargers, locked. You hear shooting outside, you hear rockets. What's the plan?There's no plan, at a certain point, we got a message from someone who's responsible of the security for the entire region, and is a member of the village. So he sent them in the communities group a message, "there are terrorists inside the village. Everybody lock yourself, nobody goes out of the safe room". This was a very short message, so we said, okay, we are locking ourselves, and after an hour since we were there, the communication collapsed, no Internet, no cellular. In any case, we did have like a glitch of signals every two hours or three hours, and then all the WhatsApp messages, hundreds of them, but then we are disconnected again. So we were eventually basically 12 hours in the safe room. It's a very small room, by the way, it's a 8, 9 quadratic meter. We kept occupying our kids, I brought books and games and of course, fruits, and then later, a little bit more food.You went out of the safe room a couple times?Yeah, yeah. And it was a little bit stressful.I would say that sounds like an understatement.Yeah, but I need to bring some food. We wanted to occupy them and keep them quiet. We communicated whispering for the entire day.Because you didn't want terrorists to hear that you were in there.Yeah, because we didn't have Internet, we couldn't just put them on Netflix for 12 hours long with earphones, which would be the best solution. We need to occupy them. So we brought books, we brought games. We managed somehow to occupy them for 12 hours. 12 hours until we decided to go out. You know, my son told me, I think it was twice or three times during the day that he needs to go to the bathroom to pee. And I told him, so we are going out, we are not talking, we are not making a sound. I'm taking you to the bathroom, you are peeing on the ceramic, not on the water. So there won't be any noise, of course, I didn't flush the water, and we ran back. He didn't question me, he did what I said, and it was great. My daughter, which I think it was at 11am or something, she told me, "daddy, I need as well to the bathroom". So I told her, listen, there are a lot of alarms, if you can hold it, let's wait, if you can't, I will take you, but she was 8, so I assumed she can hold it. And she told me, you know what I can hold it. In the meanwhile, and only when the day ended at 9.30pm, when we were already in the center, in the relative's house safe, she remembered she needed to the bathroom. She forgot about it. She didn't mention it anymore. I guess in the back of her head she understood the severity of the situation. Although she didn't know anything about terrorists, gunshots, people being hurt or killed. She understood that she needed to cooperate.Right. And so between, let's say, you know, eight, nine in the morning, when you're figuring out that this is an enormous attack, and then I know that later in the evening you. You got out and you'll tell us about that. What's worth pointing out about all those intervening hours in the middle, you're making a couple of runs to the bathroom, especially with your son. Your daughter decides that she can wait, which is amazing, but okay. You're making, so you're doing that. You go out a couple times to get some water, get some fruit. So the kids are not starving. Obviously you're whispering. You're getting periodically, you know, 100 WhatsApps and then nothing for a couple hours. And then another 200 WhatsApps and then nothing. And what else was going on for all these hours?You know, the main question that we ask ourselves, like everybody in the area, where's the army? For hours we're asking, where's the army? Because every time in the years before that that we met representatives of the army, they always told us, if you know, God forbidden, there will be such a scenario. The civilian troop, which are people from the village with the Kitat Konenut.Well that's the civilian military response team.Exactly. They are the first defense line, they should delay the attack for 20 minutes, 30 minutes tops. And that's it, the army will arrive and seize control of the situation. And for hours nobody came, the army didn't came. And we said, what's going on? And where are the troops? Where are the army?Now presumably the people that are the head of the security in the Netiv Ha'Asara are writing people in the army and are saying, where are you? And what was the response that they got?So actually I saw an interview by this person two days after October 7th. He was interviewed and they asked him this question specifically because he spotted the parachutes that came, the motorized parachutes, and he went to warn his other colleagues and called the army and they told him, "you're on your own, good luck". And I remember the interviewer ask him, shocked, this is "this is what they sent?".What do you mean "your on your own"? You're the army. What does that even mean?And he said, this is what they told me. "You're on your own, good luck", that's it.No explanation?No explanation. Of course, you know, now we know this was chaotic and there were like more than a hundred places where they broke through the fence. so, you know, after six hours, it was 2:00pm I saw a message, maybe it was sent earlier and delayed, but in any case, I saw a message saying that the troops are starting to enter the village from our back the gate. So I said, oh, finally, and you know, 30 minutes, an hour tops, they will clear the area from terrorists and they will come to knock on our doors and say, you can go out. And we waited an hour and nobody came. And another hour and another hour and four hours we waited and nobody comes. And you hear shooting during this whole time.The gunshots I don't hear at that point. Of course, the missiles kept on coming from the entire day long, but I said, either they came and the situation is so severe they just not able to manage it and that's bad news. Or someone lied to us or it was a wishful thinking and you know, rumors, you know, our rumors are. And maybe they didn't come.If the army was there, there would have been shooting, you would think.Yeah. And now I know that except for one commander that came early in the morning with his jeep and another soldier, I think it was his own initiative, the troops didn't come to Netiv Ha'Asara at any point. There was, I think, afternoon, some small unit came and helped arrest some Gazan civilians, but the real troops, they didn't come.Right. And by the way, our listeners can't see you're sort of making quotes with your fingers. "Gazan civilians" , this whole question of what is a civilian and what is not a civilian. These were not part of the Nukhba troops, obviously, but we know from testimonies that these people that are "civilians" came in, they stole, they actually raped, they killed, they actually kidnapped a few people at the end of the day.Some will agree that they made the biggest atrocities, no more than the Nukhba. In any case. So there weren't any troops, it was already almost 6pm, getting dark soon, I talked to my wife and we said, okay, it's going to get dark soon. We can stay during dark time because we weren't sure how long can we keep the kids in this room calm and quiet any longer, they were getting nuts and you know, there will be a point where they will tell me I need to go to the bathroom and not to go to pee, and we'll need to take them. It will last a couple of minutes. It's dark, so we need to put on light on flashlight or something, we don't have curtains on the windows of the bathrooms, so we were afraid we'll draw attention. So we said, the moment we have opportunity, we will go. And there was a certain point when someone from the community sent a message, he said, "we went, my family and myself with our car through the back gate", so we knew it's possible. And I even saw a message when saying that the entire route from the back gate all the way to the highway through the backfields is secured by army troops. So I said, okay, so now we need to find a good opportunity and to go. And in half past six, there was a 15 minutes of pause between missiles. So my wife went to pack a suitcase. In five minutes, she packed suitcase for all of us. I said, wait here. I will go outside and make sure there is no one outside.Are you armed at this point or no?No, nothing. Only I only brought a knife to the safe room. Now I have a pistol that's not a match, but still. And I went outside and I looked very carefully. It's very stressful point of time to make sure there are no terrorists around.Was it silent outside? Now when you're out there.No, first of all, you see smoke and fires from all the area. You hear battles, but from afar, you hear the alarms.But 100 meters around your house, now.That was kind of peaceful at that point.You don't see anybody?No, nobody.No terrorists, no Israelis, nobody soldiers, no nothing, Nobody.And I rushed to the car to put the suitcase. And then I see right next to the car, near our house, one of the motorized parachute, which at the right at the beginning of the day, they came with three of them and landed. One of them landed next to our car. I'm not sure if it was one terrorist or two, but it was a big one. And I'm not sure why, but they probably turned to the other way and went to another house and from there to another house and not to our house.Sheer luck.Sheer luck. I don't even care to ask why, it's Sheer luck. But still, it was a surreal image. And I went back and I told them, okay, we are rushing to the car, we're not putting any seat belt on, nothing. In our family, my wife is the driver, so I held my boy in my hands and my daughter, I just told her, keep low in the back seat. In the back seat even just, you know, keep low. There are alarms, didn't want to say terrorists. And we rushed through the road to the back gate.How long a drive is that in time?Couple of minutes, not too long.Nobody saw you?Luckily we didn't see any terrorists and luckily we didn't face any dead bodies. Because if we would take the other way through the streets of the village and not the one we took, we would see the dead bodies of two of our neighbors that died next to our house, 50 meters, 70 meters from our house and other dead bodies. I know that my wife's family that lives near us.How many people in the end died from the Netiv Ha'Asara?20 overall. 17 Inside the village, two teenagers that went fishing and were killed by the terrorists that came with boats. And one that every Saturday takes his bicycle to ride in the fields next to our village and he was caught by terrorists and they found his body four days later, so 20 overall. So we rushed through the back gate. Of course, no troops, nobody. Nobody escorted us, of course, that was another lie of wishful thinking. I'm not sure, but in any case, we just rushed to the backfield, to the highway. Traffic was moving, but it was packed with thousands of cars of people from the Gaza's envelope trying to rush to the center. It was very slow and there were a lot of police blockage to make sure that no terrorists will go to the center, you know, so that made it even slower. But you know, we were in the highway, just trying to get out of the range of the missiles. And then we had finally reception in our cellular phones in Internet, so I could surf and understand a little bit what's going on. Hearing about the Kibbutzim, Kfar Aza, Beeri, Nir Oz, which the atrocities there are unimaginable, of course I heard about this music festival which now we know it's the Nova. And gradually during that evening we heard about another one that was killed in our moshav or injured. And slowly we heard about all the names of the people and that's it. And then 9:30pm we reached our relative's house. We stayed there for a week and then moved to the hotel with the rest of the community.And where are you now?Well, now we are still in Tel Aviv As people moved back to Nativ Ha'Asara?Around, I would say 15% of the population went back. The authorities still didn't claim it's safe to go back, but you can't tell people if their house is fine, you can't tell them you're not allowed to go back. So the elderly came back because they couldn't stand the moving from place to place anymore. The farmers, which on a regular basis, any day, they had to go to the crops, to the greenhouses. So they already stayed there with their families. And in the last couple of months, even some few families.85% of the people are still not back.Not back.And what's, what is the plan of most of these 85%? Are they talking about going back? Are they saying we're done, we're not going back? They saying we're going back in the spring, we have no idea when we're going back. What's the deal?So first of all, now at least we, we know that we have funding for staying outside of Moshav until the end of June, which is amazing because until last month we only knew what's going on with us for the next month or two months.And then, you know, you have a window of several months that you're covered.Yeah.And the kids are in school. The kids are enrolled in school in a new place. And you have a place to stay?Of course, my daughter is in school, my son is in a kindergarten. Of course, in any case, we said, my wife and me, that whatever the call will be, and even if they tell us, you know, now, tomorrow we'll stop the funding and you need to go back. We won't go back until at least the summer because we want our kids to finish the kindergarten and school properly. And aside from that, we don't trust these claims. We want to see from afar that it is safe. So he said we wait until the summer and then we'll decide. In any case, now we see that the situation is not so optimistic in Gaza and we needed to decide if we would enroll them for the next year.Not optimistic in Gaza. Meaning you think the war is far from over?Far from over. And, you know, all the hundreds of thousands of people that lived in the northern parts of Gaza came back. And it doesn't look so promising.Promising in terms of that you're safe.It doesn't look safe at all.So let me just, let me combine two pieces of your life here for a second, because you are a citizen of Nativ Ha'Asara. I mean, you're also a doctoral student and you're also an author and a father and a husband and all that. But I want to talk about Nativ Ha'Asara resident for a second and a person who's centrally involved in the hostage family forum in Tel Aviv. And this question of when it's going to be safe to go back, and the hostages, they're not disconnected questions because in order for it to be safe to go back, a lot of people would say there's a lot more military work that needs to be done in Gaza. And then that raises the question, of course, of, but you have all these millions of civilians there who are, as you pointed know, quote, unquote. In other words, they're threats also. So that's where people are wondering, what do you do with all these people? But if you go to war, obviously the, the hostages are in grave danger, right? And if you want to get the hostages out, says Hamas, you have to declare an end to the war. So you're on both sides of this, right? The part of you that works with the hostage family forum, that part of your heart says, get these hostages home. And any one of us who's seen the Eli Sharabi interview understands that really time is ticking, I mean, you can't survive like this much longer. And then the part of you that's a father and a husband and a resident of Nativ Ha'Asara probably has some part of you that says the army's got to go in there and clean this out because I got to be able to move back to my home. How does a person like you, who's obviously crazy smart and thoughtful and deeply committed to Israel, how do you balance these thoughts in your own mind as to what should actually happen?For me personally, there's no dilemma. I mean, they need to bring back the hostages. That the most important, most urgent thing, even in the cost of ending the war and staying in a very unsafe situation in Gaza. And then we'll need to decide if you come back, if we go to another place in Israel. But they need to bring back the hostages. There is no question in my mind. I know that there are a lot of opinions.Well, I happen to agree with you. But then what you're saying is that we might make. First of all, you could bring back the hostages, say you're ending the war, and then not end the war. I mean, you could just quote, unquote, change your mind. You could say at the first infraction, we're going to go back. And with Trump in office, whether one loves him or hates him, that's irrelevant. For now, he'd probably give Israel a green light to go finish the work, probably. So you have some options there. But you also run the risk of actually sort of ceding part of Israel's territory to Hamas without Hamas having a single boot on the ground. In other words, you go to Kiryat Shmona and Metula in the north, there's nobody there. I mean, very, very, very few people there. We've given up territory, even though there's no enemy troops in the territory. You could imagine a world, right, where Israel gets through this war, comes out stumbling, but stronger in certain ways. Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah, whatever. But that there's parts of the north and parts of the south that are just empty, and that's a scenario, right?That's a scenario. You know, a lot of people will come back in any case. And even if people from the villages won't come back, I guess other people will come and rent houses. So I know, I'm not sure to say how to what extent will it be empty, but it wouldn't be the same as it was before if we now end the war. We know that, we know that. But still, you need to bring back the hostages.How are your kids these days? Obviously, any of us who've raised kids know that we don't have any idea how things affect them. We find out many years later how things affected them. But how are they changed, I mean, they're little, especially your son is very little. But how are they doing now? And how do you think this whole thing of that horrible day moving around, they probably now know about the people in Nativ Ha'Asara who were killed. I guess at least your daughter knows about some of them. They certainly see pictures of hostages everywhere, and they know what you do all day long. So they know about hostages. They're exposed. I mean, you can't hide. Even if you say, okay, me and my wife, we're not talking to them about this. They're going to go to school, they're going to hear about it, they're going to be on the playground, they're going to hear about it, they're going to be on the bus and somebody's going to be playing the news on their phone. I mean, whatever they're going to learn, you can't shield them from it. How are they as people?I think my son is very, is very young. Even if he hears the words hostages and they sees photos, he doesn't understand exactly what it is, and we tell him it's people that we lost and we are looking for them and it's fine, he doesn't really think about it. My daughter is a completely different story, now she's 10, and for us it's a very big challenge from the first moment after October 7th, because we really try to protect her, protect her soul, make sure she's not exposed to too much information, too graphical information. And it's tough because as, as you said, and you know, we lived two months in the hotel with the community, people talked about it everywhere. And you can't make people filter yourself. They will say whatever they want, so it was very tough. That was one of the reasons we decided to move from the hotel after two months to an apartment. And just to give you an example, maybe two examples, my daughter, for three weeks, she didn't know nothing about the hostages. I don't know how she didn't hear it in the hotel. She didn't know. And then one day a friend was there with her mother and my wife with her. And the friend told her mother, she asked her something about the hostages. He said they word the Hatufin, and my daughter heard Hatufim, she thought she says hatifim, which is snacks. And she told my wife, "I want also snacks". And then my wife understands it's time to tell her about that, so she took her aside and explained that they took people to Gaza, very gently. Didn't say anything about kids, of course. And couple of weeks later I said, okay, I took my daughter, let's take some fresh air, let's walk around in the city. And we strolled around in the streets, and then I realized we are getting near to Dizengoff Square, which you probably know, in Dizangoff Square there's a very big art installation of teddy bears, big teddy bears. Each one of them has a photo of hostage and they have red stains like blood and cuffed in their hands. It's pretty graphic.It's graphic. It's very impactful. It's a very strong art installation, but not for kids and not for my daughter which came from that place. So I made a bypass and I said, I will join the street more to the north. And I did, and I didn't realize it's all around, you know, it's continuous all the way to the street. Everywhere you have these teddy bears. So we saw them, and then she sees a photo of a small child. Maybe it was Abigail, it was like a three years old child. And then she asked me "what daddy, did they kidnapped kids as well?", she was shocked and I didn't know what to tell her, I was just silent, I felt like the last portion of security in her life just broke. And there's nothing you can do.It's the worst possible feeling as a parent.Yes. And there's nothing you can do, and ever since we still try to protect her.What'd you tell her? What'd you say?I took her aside and explained her, yes, they took kids and we tried to get them back, I try not to give too many details. When she asked, I replied very gently but not to give too many details to soften it as much as possible.Now we're more than a year later. She clearly knew about the Bibas children, right?Yeah, but there's also a story about that. First of all, she didn't even put in her mind the possibility that they will kill them. She asked me when the deal was already happening, when they will bring back the kids, "I'm waiting to see them to coming back", and I told her, listen, we don't know what's their fate. We're not sure if they're alive or dead. So she said, "what, do you think they killed them? They won't kill them. I know they are bad people, but they won't kill kids." And I thought I don't know, I don't know if they killed them. I don't know if they died in another opportunity, I don't know. But we need to, you need to understand that they might not be alive. And in the building we live now in the elevators you have these flat screens and in the bottom you have this flash news. The most horrific, the most bad flash news, only the bad news. And she's like a magnet, every time she wants to read everything and the day after they brought the remains of the kids and what we thought is the mother and apparently it wasn't, after the examination of the remains, they declared that the terrorists killed them in their bare hands. And it was on the screen. We said, I mean, we try to protect her, to make sure she doesn't see anything, and then she sees it the elevator in our building, and it was a big drama, and actually we talked with the manager and we asked him to either delete it or change it, and he changed it to Economics News, and it was some kind of solution.But she knows.She knows. I'm not sure she managed to read it, but she knows we tried to.No, but she knows that the Bibas children are dead for sure.I told her.And does she know that they were not killed by gunshots and then it was bad?I'm not sure she got it when it was on the screen.She asks about it or doesn't ask you about it?She didn't say how they died.She talked about it now periodically?No, she. She asked about it and I told her, listen, apparently they were killed and the mother was killed and we brought back the remains. And it's very sad, and that's it. I always told her, if you have questions, come to me, I will answer as much as I can, how I can, in the appropriate manner, but ask me, not people on the streets, not kids. So I try to send the messages in the most appropriate manner for 10 years old kid, which come from this place.You have any hunch about how this is going to affect her as a person? I mean, it's way too early, obviously, and nobody knows and the whole country is going to find out. We're a country in trauma, of course, but do you as parents have any hunch?Well, we know that she has fears. She has fears, especially in the time when we were in the hotel when it was so fresh and she understood that they kidnapped people and killed people from the village. She talked about it when she was going to sleep. She asked to talk with me about it, she asked question, "is it possible the terrorists will come to our hotel, to Tel Aviv?" it's funny, she asked, asked what are the conditions of the Palestinian prisoners in our prisons, and I understood she's actually asking what are the conditions that our people are being held. But she couldn't say it, it was too much for her, so she was asking. So I played along and I told her, they get food, they have their own rooms. Trying to give her the notion that the ones that are hostage in Gaza, they are hostage, but in good conditions, which of course it's not.Wow. Well, speaking of crafting narratives here about, you know, you're trying to craft a narrative of the horrors of what's unfolding in Gaza, even to this day. Even as we sit here and speak, there are people literally chained to walls in the dark, starving. I mean, it's just. It's just unthinkably horrible. But since we're talking about sort of crafting narratives, in this particular case, a narrative for your daughter and eventually, as your son gets older, probably have to craft a narrative for him, too. You're a crafter of narratives in a different way also. I mean, you do all these things. You're a family person and a husband and a father, and you're very involved in the hostage family forum, and you're just doing a tiny bit of computational biology and a PhD. You also write books, right? So you've written three so far, right?Published three. I'm writing the fourth.Fourth is in the middle. I know we're running out of time, but sort of, where does this, we call it in Israel a juke "juke ba rosh" literally means a cockroach in your head. Yeah, but in America, I mean, sort of, you know, in English, sort of this crazy idea. How's the guy that's so busy? I mean, you are so busy. Why are you writing novels?Well, I think it's mainly at another thing. It's mainly at evening, night times, after the kids are sleeping. My wife either sees the news or she's go to sleep. And then I have time and I have coffee. Coffee at night, that's brave.And I write as much as I can. But why are you doing it? Well, what got into you that you said to yourself, okay, in addition to everything else, I have to write novels.What's about how it began? Yeah, it began with the idea of the first one "Caught in between the Scale of Justice". This was how I translated, I would say, by the way, they're all in Hebrew. They are not translated. If one of the listeners is a translator and wants to contact me and provide these services.Well put your contact information in the notes and people can talk to you about them. But they're in Hebrew and people can talk to you also, by the way, about, I mean, you know, you travel around the world and people could have you come to their communities and talk to them about the experience of being Israeli during this past year. I mean all of those things, getting your books translated into English, hearing your story in person. I mean those are all things that would be great. So tell us again though, sort of why does this guy, who's so busy and who's fundamentally a scientist at heart, why are you writing these novels? Why did you write this first novel about "Caught in the Scales of Justice"?Yeah. So I think maybe I will say a little bit about this book and then I will say, how did it began, "Caught in between the Scale of Justice" is a suspension drama that tells about the legal battle. Although it sounds a cliche, against all odds of someone who's called Oz Rigler. It's an alternate personality in the mind of persons suffering from dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder, claiming his basic rights of existence while above his head hangs the sword of a new drug trial that threatens in quotes, "to treat the disorder" and basically ends its own existence.And the personalities that he now thinks he is basicallyOne of the personalities launched a legal battle, says, I'm not just an imaginary figure. I have a whole life. I participated in events, in reality, I affected them. I have connections with people. You can't just say I'm imaginary, I have my rights. And start this legal battle, which sounds absurd at the beginning, but it advances and advances and during the book it gets more and more reliable. In any case, I was always fascinated by the notion of multiple personality disorder. And I think it was 2011 when one night I saw this article in the news and it made me think about it during the weekend very intensively. And then like, you know, in the cartoons you see the light bulb go off somebody's head. I got this idea and I said I must check if there was either a book or a movie or something about a legal battle of imaginary personality that says, no, I'm not imaginary, and fight for my own rights, my right to existence. And of course I checked and I didn't find any. And at that point I resigned one work from in the high tech. I was working back then and I had like four weeks until I'm starting the next one. So I said I'm going to start writing. I never write, never written professionally till then. And I had time, so I said I'll try. And I wrote I don't know, five chapters, and I really was excited about the writing, about the result, and I said, I'm gonna try. I didn't believe it back to that point that I actually make it to a full book. It took me a few years to actually gain this belief. And it took me 10 years to actually finish it because I was working or I was doing my masters or kids and stuff, but still, you know, the 40. Do you say it in English? The age of 40 crisis.Midlife crisis.Midlife crisis. I said to myself, I'm not finishing it in six months, for my 40th birthday, I won't finish it at all. And then I really started writing in seriously, every night. It could be a couple of sentences, it could be a couple of pages, but every night I sat seven days a week to write. And I finished it eventually in a couple of months. And then I understood that I can write books, now I had my own confirmation and I was really excited about that, and I think a year and a half after that, I finished my third one.Wow. And now you're working on the fourth.Now I'm working on my fourth.And these are just, this is fiction in the best sense of the word. It's not about Israeli issues. it's just a whole other exploration, it's a part of your personality and your imagination and your creativity that is so interesting to me because it's so different from computational biology where it's all rooted in fact. Maybe I don't understand computational biology enough to know that there's really great similarities, but it, it does seem like a left brain, right brain kind.So there. I thought about it, actually. There are similarities there, you know, both require strong elements of creative thinking and rich imagination research in, in general. You know, I was warned to the side of mathematics and the theory of computer science before that. So there is that. And both required, of course, an extensive research. So there are similarities, but, you know.People are interested in different things. Yeah, well, look, I mean, it's. It's a fascinating experience to sit and talk to you. It's a sobering experience, to put it very, very mildly, to hear what you and your family went through. You know, this is a story where, quote, unquote, you know, everything came out okay for you, but it's still, still a, a completely crushed community, a community that doesn't exist right now. It's kids who are carrying baggage that you can't even begin to Imagine what the implications are going to be. It's a life that you had that ended. I mean, you may go back to Nativ Ha'Asara, but it's not going to be the same Nativ Ha'Asara. In that regard, it's very much like the country, we're never going to go back to the old country, we're going to have to figure out what this new country is going to look like. And I think it's very important for all of us, even as the war sort of becomes the new normal, unfortunately, and the hostage tragedy continues in its horrifying twists and turns that we can't even imagine to remember that normal, everyday people, who, quote, unquote, are okay, went through unbelievably traumatic things that, you know, 99% of the people listening to this have never experienced anything even remotely close to that. And thank God that they haven't. And I think this conversation is a really important reminder to everybody listening how many thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people there are out there who are fine, nobody got killed, nobody got hurt, nobody got kidnapped, but they're, they went through experiences that are just completely transformative. And to understand Israel, one needs to remember how many thousands of people have, in one shape, way, manner or form, been through that. And so to hear about your own experience and then to sort of understand this other side of you that's the creative writer and so forth, and to have our listeners, you know, know about you. And, you know, you said if somebody out there wants to translate a book from Hebrew into English, you'd love to hear from them. I hope somebody will you know, say, yeah, I'm going to look up his email address and find it and write him. And maybe people will say, yeah, this is actually the kind of story that is real. Not a hostage, not a soldier, just a regular quote, unquote Israeli. But who gives us a kind of a sense of how profoundly transformative October 2023 was and is going to be for the future. Who might want to say, come, you know, come talk to us, that would also be a great thing. But it was really super important for our listeners to hear yet another vantage point of what transpired on that horrifying day. And I'm sure it's not easy to talk about. So I, I appreciate it is very important and I appreciate your summoning up whatever reserves, emotional reserves one needs to do it and for telling us your story. And I just hope and pray that the next time you and I get together, either for a coffee or for a conversation that there's much better news on the hostage front that you and your family God willingly back in Nativ Ha'Asara. The country will be healing and we're never going to forget, but we'll be moving on, hopefully in a very positive direction. So Noam Kalush, once again, thank you very much for taking the time to do this.Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

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The big story in these parts, these days, is the very confusing saga of what’s known here as Qatargate. While in many respects, it’s “just another scandal in this administration,” it smells in a different sort of way, so it’s important to understand it.

Today we offer our readers a quick glance at the basics for those who have understandably had trouble figuring out what this is all about, and we’re posting an interview wtih Lt Col (Res) Dr. Udi Levy, former head of the Mossad Unit responsible for thwarting financial terror — which it appears is precisely what Qatar has been doing for years.

WHAT IS QATARGATE?

The “Qatargate” controversy centers on allegations that two close aides to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—Jonatan Urich and Eli Feldstein—accepted payments from Qatar to enhance the Gulf state’s image within Israel. These payments were reportedly funneled through an American lobbyist, with the purported aim of influencing Israeli media and public opinion during ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, in which Qatar played a mediating role. Additionally, the campaign allegedly sought to discredit Egypt, another key mediator in the negotiations.

The scandal has deeply unsettled the Israeli public, given Qatar’s perceived ties to Hamas and its lack of formal diplomatic relations with Israel. While Netanyahu is not officially a suspect in the investigation, he has been questioned by police and he, in turns, has poopoo’ed the entire matter and has dismissed the probe as a “political witch hunt.” The arrests of his aides have intensified scrutiny on his administration, especially as he concurrently faces an ongoing corruption trial and an investigation by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes.

Complicating matters further is Netanyahu’s recent attempt to dismiss Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar, whose agency is involved in the Qatargate investigation.

HOW IS NETANYAHU'S ATTEMPT TO DISMISS RONEN BAR, HEAD OF THE MOSSAD, RELATED TO QATARGATE?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to dismiss Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, is closely linked to the “Qatargate” scandal. This controversy involves allegations that Netanyahu’s close aides accepted payments from Qatar to promote the Gulf state’s interests within Israel.

Sequence of Events:

1. Qatargate Investigation: Under Bar’s leadership, Shin Bet initiated an investigation into claims that Netanyahu’s advisers received funds from Qatar to influence Israeli media and public opinion.

2. Attempted Dismissal of Ronen Bar: Amid this investigation, Netanyahu moved to dismiss Bar, citing a loss of trust following Shin Bet’s failure to prevent the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Critics argue that this dismissal was an attempt to obstruct the ongoing Qatargate probe.

3. Legal and Public Backlash: The dismissal led to public protests and legal challenges. Israel’s Supreme Court temporarily suspended Bar’s removal, and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara opposed the dismissal, highlighting potential conflicts of interest due to the active investigation involving Netanyahu’s aides.

In summary, Netanyahu’s attempt to dismiss Ronen Bar is widely perceived as an effort to interfere with Shin Bet’s investigation into the Qatargate scandal, thereby protecting his close associates and potentially himself from scrutiny.

WHY IS IT THAT AT A MOMENT LIKE THIS, WITH SECURITY SO CRITICAL, NETANYAHU HAS FAILED TO NOMINATE A REPLACEMENT FOR RONEN BAR, WHOM HE IS TRYING TO FIRE?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to replace Ronen Bar as head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, encountered significant obstacles. On March 31, 2025, Netanyahu nominated former navy commander Eli Sharvit for the position. However, within a day, Netanyahu withdrew Sharvit’s nomination, stating he intended to consider other candidates. The brief nomination period did not include a formal appointment or swearing-in ceremony for Sharvit.

The withdrawal followed reports that Sharvit had participated in the 2023 protests against Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms, raising concerns about his alignment with the government’s stance.

This development occurred amid legal challenges and public protests regarding Netanyahu’s decision to dismiss Ronen Bar. The Israeli Supreme Court temporarily suspended Bar’s dismissal pending further review, adding complexity to the leadership transition at Shin Bet.

As a result, the position of Shin Bet chief remained in flux, with Bar’s dismissal on hold and no confirmed successor. Netanyahu’s administration faced increased scrutiny over these decisions, reflecting broader tensions within Israel’s political and security establishments.

WHY WAS THE EDITOR OF THE JERUSALEM POST ARRESTED AS PART OF THE QATARGATE INVESTIGATION?

Zvika Klein, the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, was arrested in connection with the “Qatargate” investigation due to suspicions that he participated in a scheme to promote Qatar’s interests in Israel in exchange for benefits. This investigation centers on allegations that close aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted payments from Qatar to enhance the Gulf state’s image within Israel.

Klein’s involvement came under scrutiny following his trip to Qatar in 2024, during which he conducted interviews with senior Qatari officials and subsequently published articles portraying Qatar positively. Israeli authorities suspect that this trip and the resulting coverage were part of a broader effort orchestrated by Qatari agents to influence Israeli media narratives. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara stated that Klein was initially summoned as a witness but became a suspect after his testimony indicated potential involvement in receiving benefits from Qatar in return for favorable coverage.

Klein has denied any wrongdoing, asserting that his journalistic activities were conducted transparently and without any improper influence. He expressed shock at his arrest, stating, “Not even in my worst nightmares could I have imagined this.”

Klein was released from house arrest on April 3, 2025, but the investigation remains ongoing.

HOW HAS ALL THIS IMPACTED NETANYAHU’S POLITICAL STANDING?

The “Qatargate” scandal has significantly affected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political standing, adding to his existing legal and political challenges. The mere idea that senior members of his administration were in the pocket of Qatar, which funds Hamas and thus made the October 7 attacks possible, simply smells very bad.

Impact on Netanyahu’s Political Standing:

1. Increased Scrutiny and Legal Challenges: Although Netanyahu is not officially a suspect in the Qatargate investigation, he has been questioned by police. This development adds to his ongoing corruption trial, intensifying public and legal scrutiny.

2. Public and Political Backlash: The scandal has led to public protests and criticism from opposition figures. Critics argue that Netanyahu’s attempt to dismiss Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar, whose agency is investigating the Qatargate affair, represents an effort to obstruct justice and undermines Israel’s legal and security institutions.

3. Strained International Relations: The alleged involvement of Netanyahu’s aides in promoting Qatari interests has raised concerns among Israel’s allies, potentially impacting diplomatic relations, particularly with countries like Egypt, which has been a key mediator in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

In summary, the Qatargate scandal has compounded Netanyahu’s legal woes, eroded public trust, and posed challenges to Israel’s diplomatic relations, thereby weakening his political position both domestically and internationally.

AND WHAT IF THERE WERE TO BE ELECTIONS?

As of early April 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political standing in Israel has been notably impacted by recent events and public sentiment.

Current Polling Data:

• Public Trust: A Channel 12 poll conducted in late March 2025 indicates that 70% of Israelis do not trust the current government under Netanyahu’s leadership. Notably, among coalition voters, 36% expressed distrust in the government. (The quip around these parts is “Thank God for AIPAC — every Prime Minister needs to know that there is someone out there who will applaud him.” )

• Calls for Resignation: Surveys reveal that a significant portion of the Israeli populace believes Netanyahu should resign. For instance, a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute found that 72.5% of respondents think he should take responsibility for the events of October 7, 2023, and resign either immediately or after the Gaza war concludes.

Potential Electoral Outcomes:

• Impact of Naftali Bennett’s Candidacy: Recent polling suggests that if former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett were to re-enter politics with a new party, it could significantly alter the political landscape. A Channel 12 poll reported by The Times of Israel indicates that Bennett’s party could secure 23 seats, surpassing Likud’s 22 seats. This scenario would position the anti-Netanyahu bloc to potentially hold 66 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, compared to 49 for the current Netanyahu-led coalition.

These figures underscore a notable shift in public opinion, with a substantial portion of Israelis expressing dissatisfaction with Netanyahu’s leadership and openness to alternative leadership options.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Now, with that background, you can listen to the interview of Lt. Col. (Ret.) Dr. Udi Levy, who used to run the branch of the Mossad assigned to fight financial backing for terror.

The original audio and UnXceptable’s translation on its Instagra page is below. We have pasted it to the very top, as well, since some of our readers have trouble with Instagram links.

A quick reminder that Passover starts this coming weekend. For the week of Passover, out of respect for those observing both days of the holiday at the beginning and at the end, we will be on a reduced schedule.

What about limits? If the “Haredi” canton decided that women could not vote, would the rest of Israelis have to accept that? What about military service? Are the Haredim still not obligated to serve? What about Arabs and national service?

Is it called survival if what we do saves the country but breaks our hearts?

Those are the issues Professor Kandel and I discuss in this final segment.

Eugene Kandel served as a Professor of Economics and Finances at the Hebrew University, and previously taught at the University of Rochester and the University of Chicago. Since 2023, Kandel serves as the Chairman of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Kandel is also the Chairman of the ISFI, a non-profit aimed at increasing the resilience of Israel as a state. He chairs RISE Israel, a non-profit dedicated to supporting resilient and innovative Israeli economy. In 2015-2021 Kandel was the CEO of the Start-up Nation Central, a non-profit focused on Israeli technological innovation solving pressing problems around the world. In 2009-2015 Kandel served as the Head of the National Economic Council and the Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel and was actively involved in shaping the economic strategy and policy of Israel.

To learn about Professor Kandel, his proposal and this project, see the following additional resources:

Israel Strategic Futures website

Israel Strategic Futures YouTube Channel

Israel Strategic Futures LinkedIn page

Israel Strategic Futures Facebook page

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, which we are making available to all our readers and listeners.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Okay, we are back for the third and final part of our long conversation with Professor Eugene Kandel, who, along with his colleagues at the Israel Strategic Futures Institute, is trying to think through very clearly, very strategically, very openly, and very honestly, what are the fundamental structural issues that Israel face that, frankly, make the war seem like a minor problem. Because if we don't fix those structural issues, it doesn't really matter who wins the battle between Israelis and Palestinians because we're not going to be here anyway. We're essentially, as he argued in the first conversation, doing Iran's work for it because we're destroying our ability to survive. In the second conversation, He described more or less the strategic direction or the structural direction, I guess I should say, that he and his partners at the Israel Strategic Futures Institute have in mind, which is to copy big chunks of what Switzerland has done to have a federal system, a canton system, and a local system. He outlined that for us in the previous conversation. In this conversation, I want to ask Eugene one question more about the actual nature of the solution. And then I'm going to move from the head to the heart for a second, and then we'll wrap it up. To go back to the previous conversation and talking just about how the idea itself works, I want to hear more about the judiciary, where the judiciary lies. So let's say, for example, the Haredi. I keep calling it the Haredi Canton, which I know you don't want to do. You want to call it the Torah primary Canton, but I'm just using liberal democratic for the middle, Arab for the left, even though it's not that it's a country of all of its residents. There could be Jews who are part of that also.No, it's more so that about half of our population would choose to be in the liberal.In the middle one. Okay, but I'm just I'm using very rough and dirty codes, but I just want to make sure our listeners understand that I'm dumbing down the nuance of the way that you've called these Alumot or cantons. But let's just say that I'm going to call the Haredi Canton for a second, even though I know you don't call it that. They decide, Oh, yeah. Okay. Women don't vote. We're going to have elections, and we are going to internally vote that women don't vote. Or if the The majority of the non-Zionist Aluma is Arab, and presumably, the more hardcore Arab, because the more moderate Arabs would join what I would call the moderate liberal democratic Aluma. So that also decides, Yeah, women don't vote or whatever. What happens then? Is that up to them?No. Certain basic rules of democracy that today are not really debatable. I mean, it's not like there is a strong movement of not letting women vote.In France, women got the vote in the 1940s, right? I think it was 1945 or 46.No, I think much earlier. I think in Switzerland. In Switzerland, it was much later.Okay, I'm not sure. But okay, go ahead. You're arguing that there's some basic fundamental democratic values. But the Haredi Canton doesn't buy into the democratic values. That's the whole point. But there is a very big difference, for example, between women not voting and, for example, not letting women ride on the bus in the front. There are certain things. And the difference is not as strict as some of us would have wanted, that you can easily say, this goes to here. But remember that in this world, we have to create, in some sense, win-win for everybody in order for everybody to agree to this change. This or some other similar change. So we have to separate. There will be negotiations, and certain things, if we cannot live with them at all, for example, you cannot, sorry for this, you cannot have sex with a 12-year-old. That will be definitely criminal offense, and the set of criminal laws will be embedded, and so they have to be backed by some issues that are clearly not okay.Even if that trumps Torah law?Yeah, but voting women does not. But if it really trumps Torah law, then it has to be left to them to decide. This is the first partition, but that partition is, there are certain parts of it are clearly black and white that we cannot just allow that, and certain things will have It needs to be negotiated. But there is additional safeguard, is that if you start, for example, suppose we would have allowed that, and they basically say, "We're not going to have women vote".In what I'm calling the Haredi Canton?How many families do you think will leave?I don't know.Well, those who care about this would say, I'm no longer willing to be part of that. I want to live in a society where I vote as a woman.Okay. So let's say two-thirds of the Haredi Canton leaves. You still have a canton.But remember that that canton now needs to finance itself. It has a huge problem.Let's say that they can have the women go to work and they can make it work economically. But we're going to say that, theoretically, at least, there is in this Canton a rule that women don't vote. I mean, Theoretically could happen is all I'm asking you about the system.But today in Bet Shemesh, in parts of Jerusalem, women are forced to wear full face covering. I mean, in France, it's illegal. In Israel, apparently, it's legal. You can't because the woman apparently decides to do that. Of course, the woman does not decide to do that on her own.She's being pressured.She's been within the culture. So in some sense, what are we talking about? With all the laws and all the protection, we have that. Women are not walking on certain sidewalks. Women are sitting in the back of the bus. There is a certain limit to paternalism.All right. Basically, what you talked about before, and I thought it was a very profound idea, what did you call it? The equity of values?Parity of esteem.Parity of esteem. So what you're saying is that Daniel Gordis has to learn not to be so paternalistic and condescending. And I'm saying this not facetiously. I have to look at that society, at that Canton that says women can't vote, or women have to sit in the back of the bus, or that women cannot walk on that sidewalk. And I have to say, it rubs me the wrong way. I would never want that for my family or my daughters or my granddaughters or for my sons or grandsons. I would just never want that. But I can't look down on it anymore. I have to understand that it comes from a world of values and a world of Torah that may consider be given by God, not negotiable. I have to simply learn to honor something that my liberal democratic education taught me to dishonor. I don't have to honor it in the sense of approve it, but I have to honor it in terms of the right of it to exist.The right of it to exist because failing to do that, if you say they have no right to exist, you're just giving them the right to say that you have no right to exist.Right. That brings us right back to where we started, and the whole thing falls apart.I'm an economist. In economics, everything is measured in relative terms, relative to alternative. The alternative is really, really, really bad. And so what we're saying is, let's improve. We cannot reach an utopia. We cannot reach it in military service. We cannot reach it in majority of places because our values come from two different axioms. And you can't argue about these axioms.Right. Well, that's the major of axioms.I think the Hume was the right axiom. And they think that Alacha has the right axiom. These things are not comparable unless people are forced to come and adapt.We could get to a world. Now, I want to ask you a little bit to move more towards the heart head issue, and then we'll push that question a little further, then we'll wrap up. I'm thinking about Yom Ha'Zikaron and Yom Ha'Atzmaut, Memorial Day for Fallen Israeli soldiers and victims of terror, and Independence Day. I could see a world, tell me where I'm wrong, that the Torah Canton, which I've been calling the Haredi Canton, they don't do those. They don't do those now. They don't do them now. When you walk into Mea Shearim on Yom Ha'Zikaron and there's a siren, nobody stops. Everybody's walking on the cycle. I have had more than one occasion when I've been there on Yom Ha'Zikharon, and they haven't stopped. I found it so profoundly upsetting that I now make sure not to be anywhere near there on Yom Ha'Zikharon because it just ruins my day. You could see a world, I guess, in which what you're calling the country of all of its residents, they don't want to celebrate Yom Ha'Atzmaut because it's too rooted in. But it's the The official narrative of the country is that we're all celebrating this, that on days certain things are closed, and there are parades, and there's music, and there's this, and there's that. So it's true, there are outliers on the religious side, and the Arab side, and the hypersecular other side that are not doing it. But there's a very clear narrative emerging from the state of Israel on Yom Ha'Atzmaut, Yom Ha'Shoah, Yom Ha'Zikaron, and so on and so forth. It'll be different, right?I don't think so.No, you don't think so?No. So if anything, people say also in the same way, but in the opposite direction, people say, Well, these liberal democratic Aluma will lose all connection to Judaism. And my point is that I say it's exactly the opposite.I think you're right here.Why is it exactly the opposite? It's in both directions. Because today, that Haredi, for him, this Yom Ha'Atzmaut, siren It's not a Jewish way to commemorate the dead. The Jewish way to commemorate the dead is to read the Tehilim and say Yzkor. For him, it's foreign, and it's part of the same system that is trying to impose on him foreign values. He resists that. So for him to stand, it's a statement that he affiliates with these values. But if these values stop being threatening to him, it's no longer imposing on him, he says, "Look, just out of respect to my fellow countrymen who lost their children in there, I'll stand". It's not against Torah. You can't explain it by a religious decree, the hand stand at the siren, or the same thing in the opposite direction. Today, I know a lot of Jewish parents who actively oppose getting any Jewish content, religious content, not religious, like traditional Jewish, like Judaism.Like learning Jewish texts.Not Jewish, but Judaism, context in their high school, in their school system. I send my children to "Tali", so they learn. Two of my children have bagrut in Tushba, five units.Rabbinic texts.Right. Rabbinic texts. They enjoyed it. They know it. They're not religious. But I wanted them to know what I missed from my upbringing in the Soviet Union. But people actively resist that because they see this as basically converting your children. Today, for example, there are kids in some schools setting up a stand to put tefilins. There's a huge uproar because it's seen as an attempt to change the culture of children that I send to school. If I know that there nobody is trying to impose anything on that, because that's the strategy, by the way. There are certain parts, by the way, not Haredi, but there are certain parts that are trying actively to bring Judaism and to force it on people. The minute you force it on people, they They're rejected. By the way, in Iran, after the Islamic Revolution, the attendance in mosques dropped dramatically. That happens every time. And so you resist when people are trying to those things on you. The minute you're not afraid, this is 3,000 years of my history. These are my people. Why do I not want my children to know their history? It would be crazy.Yeah. I mean, we haven't talked at all about the conflict, and we're not going to talk about the conflict today because it's a whole separate conversation. But we're living in this era of hostage exchanges and hostages getting out, and we're hearing stories and interviews with people that are just chilling. But one of the things that I've been finding fascinating, I mean, obviously, this is a very small footnote to the story, but I just find it fascinating, is the number of people who are in tunnels for hundreds of days, petrified. Who are totally secular, who found some deep comfort in delving, zipping their bucket into the well of Jewish tradition.Just saying Shma Israel.Right. Eli Sharabi talked about it in his interview in Uvda. He said, Shma Israel every morning. Again, he said, I'm not religious, and I don't think he's going to be religious now, but there was something about connecting himself to a larger story that was so powerful, that even when his legs chained by metal and unable to walk and being fed a tiny bit of food one day a week, and he lost basically 40% of his body weight. He still said every morning it gave him strength. There's one young woman that actually started to keep Shabbat and kashrut under her captors, and she wouldn't eat the meat, whatever little meat they brought, she wouldn't eat. And she fasted on Yom Kippur, even though she was already starving. And again, I'm not saying that this is a phenomenon, but I think what it shows is that there was a human tendency to want to make ourselves part of a larger story and to want to make ourselves part of a larger cultural and spiritual story. And part of what's happened in Israel, as you're saying, is that people are running away from it because they're feeling that everybody's trying to force them to do it. So they want nothing to do with it. And if they just don't feel forced to do it, God forbid, not because they're hostages, but because they're just human beings who are searching for meaning and anchors and roots, they might find themselves actually free from religion, drifting more towards Jewish engagement.Learning.Learning. In fact, there I completely agree with you.Just two points. One is that a religion, this is a connection to you people, to the persecution. You feel that you're part of this, and you will, yes, we persevere at Yehuda. But it also very powerful psychological tool. So it allows you to connect to something and keep yourself sane in four or 500 days in the tunnels. That's insane. Natan Sharansky, by the way, says when he was sitting nine years in the camps, he went on hunger strike to get his Tehilim back or his prayer book back, or his Sidur, because it's a connection and it's something that connects you and then it allows you to to have a psychological surrounding that gives you comfort, where no comfort can be found. The other point is about conflict. We definitely are not going to talk about, but what we propose actually offers ways between this single state and this two state solutions, neither one of them looking promising right now. Instead of going and saying, well, we have no, nothing to do, some kind solution in which you have a more complex confederation type of arrangement starts sounding much better.So like Palestinian quasi-cantons.But again, this is too early.Let's first structure ourselves, and then it will allow us to figure out how we can actually go out and say, "We need to solve this".Not immediately. We won't be able to solve immediately, but with patience over 50 years to figure out how it can be done.Okay. I said we were going to go to the hard head thing, but I want to ask you one more question first, because everything you say raises so many interesting questions. Who goes to the army? What happens if the Haredi Canton, again, that's my nomenclature, not yours, but the Torah primary Canton says, "We're not going to the army. Our children are going to study". The country of all of its residents says, "We're not going to the army. Armies are oppressive, and they do terrible things, and we do army". Isn't that right where we are now, you can't stop missiles from hitting Baqa, but allow them to hit Mea Shearim, and that's ridiculous. You can't tell terrorists, if they cross the border, "Please go to that block because they don't serve, this block, we're going to shoot you". I mean, obviously, it doesn't work. So aren't you going to find a situation where that middle group is once again defending everybody, which is exactly the situation we have now?Well, first of all, I've spent about six years trying to figure out the solution for the draft. There is even a whole proposition bearing my name. Unfortunately, it was rejected not by Haredim, but by others. And it was, unfortunately, one of my failures in the government. But what I'm saying is that, what I'm saying is two things. What was possible 10, 15 years ago is no longer possible. Two, we are not trying to create utopia. We cannot snap our fingers and create magical solutions. So what we want to do is to create a much significant improvement relative to what happens today and hope for the best. So that implies two things. First of all, there are two immoral things in the context of our perception of this, not the Haredi perception our perception. One of them is immoral in our perception, but moral in the Haredi perception, which is that people who study Torah do not go to war. Their interpretation in Torah, et cetera, I am going to go to there. But at least there they have 'one of you will have'. But there's another thing which, in my opinion, is even more immoral, is that people whose children do not go to the military and do not risk their lives, telling the children of others what dangers they're going to go to by their decision. That's completely immoral. And that has nothing to do with the Haredi religious beliefs. It's just immoral. Because if you're not sending your children to existential risk, to their life being in danger, you have no moral right to sit and decide on where they go and to what extent they're going to risk their lives.You mean when you're voting for the Knesset and the policies of the Knesset and so forth?No, it's just immoral. I mean, you have to excuse yourself from. You should, not could, should excuse yourself if you're a moral person. But given that this is not the case, what we're doing is the first thing in our proposal, we're saying that the Knesset will not have a power. The Knesset will be chosen, appointed according to the size of each Aluma population. That's a proportional representation on all issues apart from military. Because the military issue, you have to have people who make decisions, should represent people who children risk their lives.But that also means foreign policy also.Well, to the lesser extent, to the lesser extent. But foreign policy that is no defense, is not. But the foreign policy that is defense, yes.Which countries you sign peace treaties with and how much territory you give up to have peace with Saudi Arabia.Yeah, but those things will have to be determined anyway. I'm talking about day to day. I'm not talking about whether you give up territories or not. That military group is not going to decide. But everything else is that military group is going to decide. We are talking about a mini-knesset, like a Council for Defense that consists of 27 people, three coming out of each Aluma because you need to have a representative, but the rest will be proportional to the service of the people from that Aluma in the military. But that's one side of it. So it solves a very, very strong problem. So you know now that the people who are sending your children to take risks, their children are taking risks. So it's no longer this guy is not sending it. That's a big, big change. The second thing that we're proposing is that to introduce a mandatory service for everyone. The mandatory service includes Haredi, Arabs, men, women, everybody.But it could be national service.No, but the first thing we have to agree that everybody serves the same amount of time under the same conditions. It's not voluntary like today. It's mandatory. Everybody at age 18 goes and serves for two and a half years Their country. Now, the question is, first of all, you don't need that many people in the military. The second of all, but you have the police, you have jails, you have units that provide emergency support, you have firefighters, you have a whole bunch of things that in case of, let's say, an earthquake, you need emergency support teams. They need to be trained, et cetera. In the peace time, they can do other things like constructions, improving infrastructures. So what we propose is that each Aluma will decide what percentage of its residence will be mandatory. The first pick will be of the military. I would presume that the Aluma, the Jewish democratic Aluma, will say the military has the first pick, like today. But the others may choose different. What does that change? It changes quite a lot, actually. So if you're a Haredi, you choose to live in the democratic Aluma, which quite a few of them will, will have to serve. It's not a question. We'll have to serve in the military if the military needs them.And then by the way, it's really not imposed on them because they have chosen to join that Aluma.Exactly. If you don't want that, feel free.So you get a Haredi draft without imposing anything.Exactly. You chose to be here. If you chose to be here, there are no benefits. Today, the argument is that our privileges are disconnected from our responsibilities. No, that's not going to be the case. Because you have a choice today. If you don't serve, go to where you don't have to serve. So you will have more Haredi serving, more others serving, because everybody will be serving. It's not like you're a pacifist. You're a pacifist, you still serve. I'm going to send you to serve in In jail, to be a guard in jail or to be in the police, help police our cities.Or a paramedic or whatever.Paramedic or whatever. So you're not going to avoid. So today, for example, think about Arab Kids, at age 18, you go to the university. No, you're not going to university. You go to a service and in your community or in other fields, you're going to do well to your community, develop your community. Okay, but you're not going to decide, I don't want to do it. So the combination of these three things, whoever governs this whole system, that there is a service law. Imagine that a service means that you have to go and work as a sanitary assistant in a hospital. You say, Well, maybe I don't want to work in the sanitary system. Maybe I should join the military. It's better. At least I get a profession. Maybe I get some leadership skills, et cetera. So you're going to change. And remember, this is no longer going to be, on the one hand, everybody serves. It's not a question. And if you don't serve, there are ways to impose penalties on you. And there And your penalties are imposed on the Aluma, and so you change the norms, the societal norms in each society, because we're no longer fighting against it. We're fighting together to bring this country. This country could be one of the best countries in the world. We have the human capital, we have the initiative, we need a bit more social contract here. You know what happened in the last two years? If you look on these highways, we basically stop obeying laws. It's unbelievable.No, the driving has become insane.The driving become insane. It was always pretty crazy. But today, the speed limit goes from 110 to 70. Nobody slows down. Nobody.People are 130, 140 all the time.I'm constantly flabbergasted.It's true in a lot There are different kinds of things. Let me ask you one last thing, and we'll wrap up, and I'm sure this is going to leave people thinking for a very long time. It's so thoughtful, and it's so rich, and it's so well thought out. And yet, I have to say, it's repaired, but it feels fractured in the sense that I was brought up on… Of course, I understand the problem with the Haredim, and of course, I understand the problem with Israeli-Arabs. But when I'm in the hospital or somebody, my family's in the hospital, and there's an Israeli-Arab nurse or doctor taking care of us, it's not only that I'm very grateful to that person. Obviously, I am. But I think, wow, that's what this country could be. Look at that. This is the moment when we're inching towards this vision of we're all going to do this together. There are Haredim in the army, and there are Haredim doing all kinds of things. When I come across them or meet them or see them doing what they're doing, I think, wow, okay, we have a long way to go. But we have this vision that we're all going to somehow be in this together. Some of us are going to be more Zionists and some of us are going to be more religious. Some of us are going to be more attached to the land and this and that. But we're going to build something whole. I understand all the reasons that you and your colleagues have laid out for saying, We got to break this up a little bit if it's to survive. But it does feel to me in my neshama a little bit like I have to... It's not only a parody of legitimacy of values, of esteem, which I think is a very valuable concept. It's giving up a little bit of that dream that my parents instilled in me when we were driving on the I-95 Highway on the East Coast with Israeli songs playing in the cassette recorder, and we were all singing along. It wasn't indoctrination of an intellectual sense, but it was certainly indoctrination of an emotional sense. They brought us up on this dream, and I guess it feels to me just emotionally, to save the dream rationally, I'm going to have to give up on pieces of that idealized vision that I was raised on. It's just hard for me. I'm not saying that it makes your position wrong in any way. I'm just saying that that's what I'm struggling with. It's painful for me.I know. And as you can imagine, when I started thinking about this, every time there was a significant realization, it was like somebody was punching me in the stomach. Because I said, how can it be that we won't be liberal democracy? How can you give it up? I said, well, consider an alternative. I think what you are envisioning, what we propose is making it more likely rather than less likely. Exactly your dream. Except that you have this, from your upbringing, you were raised on this melting pot narrative. Which never was true. Which was never true. It was a good marketing gimmick. But the idea of a melting pot was flawed in two senses. One is that certain people didn't want to get into the melting pot. So already, they said, No, we're not part of it.A lot of Arabs said the same thing.No, some of the Arabs were not invited. The Arabs were initially not invited to the plot. They weren't part of that. And moreover, a lot of the immigrants from the Arab countries, felt they were also not invited to the same pot. They were in their separate pot, which was, talk about parity of esteem, which was much lower esteem, depending, by the way, which country you came from.Right. Act more Ashkenazi and will accept it.Exactly. But in some communities, Iraqi community, for example, where the elites came here as well, and their self-perception was completely different than other communities where the elites left to other places. So it's a very, very complex, but they definitely didn't feel much. Many of them didn't feel in that melting point. But today, so that idea that we're all going to be one unit is flawed, for the same reason is for that why brothers and sisters, when they leave their parents' home, they are not supposed to live under the same rules as they lived in their parents' home. Each of them develops their own set of rules. And having the freedom to live under their own set of rules day to day allows them to come to their parents and to each other and be tolerant and loving of each other. Imagine that you forced all of them to live under one set of law, and one of them is Haredi, one of them is religious, one of them is lesbian that lives on Shenkin covered in tattoos, and another one is just non-religious. I mean, they would hate each other if you force them to live under one loss. What we're saying is that we're not separating anybody. We're saying, give each one of us a breathing space so we don't have to constantly fight for our survival, spiritual value survival, in that if we move a little bit together, we can become much closer to each other than if we're forced to be one. To finish this, there is a saying, "anashim hachim anachnu".And everybody uses that. From the Joseph and his brothers story.No, that's actually Lot and Abraham. Lot and Abraham, when do they say this? Abraham says to Lot. If you go left, I'll go right, because there are people who are fighting over the pastures. And you say, We don't need to fight. There's plenty of pastures. Let's stay brothers. We're brothers.By separating.Exactly. But let's move a little bit. Let's give each other breathing space, and "anashim achim anachanu" which means we are people, we are brothers, we're people of brothers. It doesn't mean that we have to force each other to adapt to something in the middle. We have to love each other. We want to love each other and be together. But let's just leave a little bit breathing space so I don't have to be afraid of you. That's the goal. So your perception is driven by this false sense of unification. Whereas what we want is unity based on celebration of our differences. And confirmation of the right to have our differences.Which is the exact opposite of a melting pot.Exactly.And the melting pot stopped working. This is you and your colleagues attempt, Save the Jewish State. Professor Eugene Kandel and his colleagues at the Israel Strategic Futures Institute have a radical, challenging, fascinating thought provoking set of assessments of what's not working in Israel, what needs to change so that Israel can work. And so, ironically, by being very different than it is in certain ways right now, the grandchild that you just had born, and Mazal to have again, and the grandchildren that I have, and the grandchild that your colleague just had, we'll all be able to, whether they're religious or secular or this or that, share something here that they'll all feel part of, all feel committed to, and as successful and prosperous as they may be, we'll all want to stay here.And lead the world on how to do that, by the way. And that would bring us right back to one of those old Jewish adages of that we have something to teach everybody. First, we have to teach ourselves that before we can teach anybody else.Professor Eugene Kendell, unbelievably fascinating, challenging, interesting, thought-provoking. Thank you very, very much all your time in this conversation. Thank you, Daniel. It was a pleasure.

Sharabi’s interview with Ilana Dayan on UVDA, Israel’s “60 Minutes,” more or less, has had a huge impact in Israel. It has now been posted on Facebook and Twitter with English subtitles by UnXeptable, an organization of Israelis in the US devoted to defending Israeli democracy.

The interview is simply a must-watch. Below are two links. Take the time to watch and to listen.

LINKS TO THE INTERVIEW:

Here is the interview on UnXeptable’s X (formerly Twitter) feed and here is the interview on Facebook. A formerly active YouTube link has been removed.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

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But it would be hard to argue that prostitution, and particularly the pimping of young, vulnerable girls from broken homes, is not a violation of some of the most fundamental values that ought to reside at the heart of a Jewish state—protecting the weak, guaranteeing women dignity and control over their own bodies, belief in the rule of law….

Which is why the scourge of prostitution, particularly by highly vulnerable young women, is such a stain on the soul of a Jewish state. For more than two decades, the Task Force on Human Trafficking and Prostitution (TFHT) in Israel has been fighting the battle against prostitution, using a variety tools. Among those tactics was adopting the “Norwegian law,” which makes the consumer of prostitution services (and not the provider) the one who violates the law.

For a while, as we’ll hear, it made a difference. Things started to get better. But what’s happening now? What is the present government’s attitude to prostitution and the police’s role in enforcing the law? And how has the trauma of an entire society as a result of this war affected prostitution the young, vulnerable women on whom it preys?

We hear today from Moria Rodal Silfen, a long time Israeli activist newly appointed to the position of CEO and Task Force Director of the Task Force on Human Trafficking and Prostitution (TFHT) in Israel.

Before we get to our interview with Moriah, or after you’ve heard her, you might want to listen to her discuss the issue in these two quick videos below.

With these as background, you’ll have a better appreciation of the guts, determination and intelligence of the woman now tasked with addressing this issue in Israeli society.

Moria Rodal Silfen is an Israeli activist and leader in the fight against human trafficking and prostitution. She currently serves as the CEO and Task Force Director of the Task Force on Human Trafficking and Prostitution (TFHT) in Israel. Rodal Silfen previously worked as a spokesperson and communications advisor for former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff, MK Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon.

In her role at TFHT, Rodal Silfen leads efforts to reduce prostitution consumption in Israel, prevent exploitation, and support victims of trafficking. She oversees initiatives aimed at raising public awareness, advancing policy changes, and expanding rehabilitation services for those affected by prostitution and trafficking.

To learn more, see the The Task Force on Human Trafficking (TFHT) English website. Should you wish to support the fight against human trafficking and prostitution in Israel, you can click here. To join the Task Force’s mailing list click here.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

My guest today is Moria Rodal-Silfen, who is the relatively new CEO of a very important organization in Israel, the Task Force on Human Trafficking and Prostitution. Not a subject that we wish we would have to talk about when we talk about Israeli society, but it is actually an issue that has long been issue in Israeli society. Israel has actually taken an approach, which is unlike the approach of some countries in the West to try to address this, which we're going to hear about, which is called the Norwegian Law. It's been in place. It's worked in some ways. It hasn't worked in other kinds of ways. We're going to hear about how the war has exacerbated the problem of prostitution, specifically, and violence against women more generally. It's not hard to figure out why. Men come back from the battle, obviously with a lot of PTSD, tremendous amounts of anger, and so on and so forth, and it just leads to where it leads. There's obviously economic hardship, and there is fear, and there's stress, and there are sirens in the middle of the night. None of this is good for anybody, and it's certainly not good for families where there's a background of violence. It's definitely not good for people who are working in the field of prostitution who themselves largely got into it because of PTSD. Then they meet a consumer who's got PTSD and there's a clash there, which is really terrible for human beings of all different sorts. Moria is probably doing the most important work in Israel on this issue right now. And I'm very grateful, Moria, for your taking the time to talk to us about this. It's not an easy subject, it's not a pleasant subject, but it's a critically important subject for those of us who care about Israel and who want Israel to be as good as society and as decent and moral as society as it possibly can. Before we talk about that, let's just start with you. You give us a little bit of background about yourself, where you grew up, and all of that, how you got to this work, what you did before, and then we'll jump in.

Thank you, Danny, for this opportunity. I'd like to start and open, reminding us all that we have hostages in captivity for the past 462 days, and we all pray for their return home, safe as soon as possible. About myself, while I was born and raised in Petah Tikva in an ultra-Orthodox family that left Bnei Brak, so I went to a Zionist school, to an Ulpana.

Ulpana, if you know, is a Zionist religious girls' school. It's more religious than a regular old religious girls high school in the middle of the city, but it's not ultra-Orthodox. It's somewhere in the middle.

For my father, to be honest, it was definitely not religious enough and too Zionist.

Because he was hardcore religious and hardcore anti-Zionist.

Definitely.

Anti-zionist or non-Zionist?

Well, it's a tough question. Somewhere in the middle. But he thought a rabbi looks only one way. He's a man and he's dressed in black. All kinds of other rabbis for him- Were not real rabbis. Yeah.

Okay, so you grew up like that?

Yeah.

You graduated the Ulpana then what?

Then I really wanted to join the army, but that was too for my family. I did my national service in a hospital, actually, in a hospital in Kfar Saba for a year. I always knew that I want to do things that help other women. For me, it was a must. First, when I studied gender in Hebrew U, and I first heard about gender and feminism, for me, it was like a new light in my life. Obviously, I have to do something about it. In the past 10-15 years, I was mostly in the Crisis Center for helping women after rape or sexual Assault. I did the Israeli Women Network for three years, and now I'm here in the Task Force.

You have a background in the Knesset also, right? I mean, so that was just a tiny bit of what you did in the Knesset?

So the gender thing was always voluntarily. And my profession in the past almost a decade was to be a spokesperson in the Knesset. And for ministers, I used to work with a whole few. I worked with ministers and Knesset members, always on media, always as a spokesperson. So I know the Knesset really well. And I know sometimes the best way to move things is lobbying, is when the right person is lobbying, not only rehabilitation after the violence occur, but the prevention, the systematic change. And this is why I came to the Task Force and not a rehabilitation organization.

Because you want to prevent the problem rather than only fix it.

It's a really important job, avodat kodesh (holy work) of to help women once the violence occurs. But I want to be there before it starts. I want to change.

Let's talk, obviously not all the prostitution that takes place in Israel is by women. There are some men, there are some trans, but the overwhelming majority, probably like what, 95% or so is women?

Actually, yeah, 95% of prostituted and trafficked people are women. We do have to say that there's men and also trans that can be abused and trafficked and in prostitution, but the majority are women. I will use the woman as a pronoun to describe the survivors. We do have to say 99% of the consumers are men.

99% of the consumers, right. Okay, so let's just talk about the women for a second. Who are they? The story used to be in Israel, I don't know how true it was, but the story used to be that they were mostly foreigners. There were all these stories in the press about people from Ukraine and the former Soviet Union that were brought in. Sometimes they knew what they were getting into, and very often they did not know what they were getting into. There was a bait and switch with the job. They would get here, somebody would take their passport, so they really couldn't go anywhere. Then they were basically trapped, and they were forced to ridiculous amounts of sexual activity and prostitution and all of that. The rumor, at least as I understand it, and you're the expert, is that it's much less foreigners now, and it's more actually Israeli women who grew up here. Tell us a little bit, first of all, about just population-wise. Who are these people? And it's probably not that different from other societies, but still, how did they end up in this life?

It was correct, mostly in the '90s, where a lot of women from the Ukraine and Russians were brought to Israel to be trafficked. This is how the Task Force started more than 20 years ago to fight trafficking. But today, we know that there's a lot of Israelis caught in prostitution, young girls, high-risk girls. They come from dysfunctional homes and young women that have, first of all, post-trauma. We know that the first reason to enter prostitution is not poverty. It's either they have been sexually molested from childhood over and over again, something that causes post-trauma that drags you into prostitution.

Why? I just understand psychologically, what's the... I mean, it's obviously very complex, and we can't do the whole thing in detail now, but just to try to understand on the simplest lay level, psychologically, you've been abused. You could imagine a world in which a girl, horribly, has been abused, taken advantage of, whatever, that anything having to do with sexuality be the last thing that she wants it. She would run away from it, that she would ever want to be seen near a man or anything. But you're saying there's an opposite dynamic also that a girl who's been abused will actually, not because of the money or not only because of the money, find her way back in this. Why? What is the psychological process there?

You think, obviously, she wants to do everything to be recovered. But when you're extremely young and the first thing you experience is that the only thing that matters is your body. Sometimes when you're younger than 10, then this is what you know about yourself. It's like a chronic disease. You keep coming back to where the violence occurred, and you keep doing it again and again because that's the only way you know yourself. We hear that. We heard it from prostitution survivors telling us that once the violence secure when they were so young, there was no way out.

Okay. They are very often the products of violence, PTSD, sexual abuse as young girls, incest... What's the typical age when women are getting into this? Are they young teens? Are they teens? Are they 20s? Do we know anything about this?

We have some research telling that usually they enter- well, it depends what you determine as prostitution. But from what I know, sometimes they start even in the age of 13 to 14, usually under 18, when it's so much easier to make them, to drag them into this world when they have no real ability to consent or to refuse. So it starts really early. The age of death for those who die in prostitution is 34 on average.

How many die a year in Israel from things related to prostitution? Are they murdered or is that what happens?

They either murdered or committed suicide or using so much drugs that usually they end up dying because prostitution is not the thing you can do for a living too long and survive. The age is 34. We don't have the accurate numbers of how many a year, but we do keep the names. When we hear from the aid organization that work with us in a coalition that we hold, we get the names. When one of them dies, we remember her.

Do we have any sense? Is it singles? Is it tens? Is it hundreds? How many women would you guess, even if you don't know, just from your knowing the field so well, how many women are dying a year in Israel? Rough. Just as we say, what's the rough?

I would say between one and two a month. One and two a month. That we know of. And I would say approximately, well, the official numbers talks about 14,000 women and men in prostitution in Israel. But we know from the aid organization that the actual number is more like 20,000 women, mostly in prostitution in Israel. Some of them in the streets, some of them in houses.

Let me just ask you a question, which is, it doesn't make anything better, but I'm just curious, how does that compare 20,000 people in a population of about 10 million? How does that compare to, I don't know, Scandinavian societies, the United States, other Western countries? I mean, not that it doesn't make any difference, really, because it's horrible no matter what. I'm just curious, do we know whether Israel has a worse prostitution problem than other Western developed countries, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, England, or is it better? Do we know anything about that?

We do know that after the '90s, were so many olim hadashim (new immigrants) from the Ukraine and Russia came here, there was really a rise in the amount of women in prostitution, unfortunately. I don't really know about what's going on in other countries, but it's really hard to tell because prostitution is well hidden. So the numbers that we know of, we only know half of the truth. There's so much more.

Tell us a little bit before we get to the whole Norwegian Law and what Israel's approach was and how this came about and when it came about and who pushed this through the legislative process and all of that. It's obvious that the war has had a huge impact in Israel on violence against women in general, and as a result, an increased use in prostitution, and the combination of the two is increased violence against prostitutes. So tell us what we know about this, the numbers, the rate of increase, something about the dynamic of why this happens. I mean, some of it's obvious, but I'm sure you have much more to say.

Once the war started after the horrible October 7th, the worst war ever happened to the Jewish life since the Holocaust, we heard about so many prostitution survivors coming back to the streets because of financial stress. We have research just from last August, pointing that so many soldiers post-traumatized, carrying PTSD from the war, are consuming more prostitution, and the prostitution became more violent because we know after every war, when there is violence in the front, soldiers in the front, there's also violence back home in the civil society, either domestic violence, either violence against prostitution. We suffer on the front and back home as well. When post-trauma meets post-trauma, then the violence is doubled.

Tell me something about the Israeli police before this whole war period and during this war period. You and I have a mutual friend who was involved in setting up this Task Force even before you were involved with it. The stories that I would hear from him is that, he really, as he told it, couldn't get the police to care very much. I don't know how true that was right before the war, because this goes back many, many years, and I don't know how true it is now. We have a whole issue, obviously, in Israel with the police, with Ben Gvir, who's the Minister of the Police, who has a very specific agenda for what he cares about that the police do.

Not prostitution.

Correct. Not prostitution. Where is the Israeli police and the judiciary on this? How helpful are the courts and how helpful are the police?

When Levi Lauer, Rabbi Levi Lauer, starts the task force almost 22 years ago, it was mostly trafficking, and they did an enormous job regarding fighting trafficking. But we have a severe problem with the enforcement of the police. It's actually ridiculous. The police doesn't enforce the law.

Because?

Well, because they don't care, I think. Because they don't care enough.

Or the police establishment doesn't care? Are they told not to enforce it?

They're not told otherwise. They're not familiar enough with the subject. You know what? Even when they do enforce, even when they do come to a brothel or to the streets to help, the first thing that will happen is probably for the woman to be inside the police vehicle. The first one to be taken. Even now, even though it's forbidden, even though the woman is the victim and we should help, the first one to be under police violence will be the woman. So we have a severe problem with the enforcement.

So the women are suffering violence at the hands of the police also?

All the time.

What is it? Are they beating them or just shoving them around? I mean, what's the-

Either giving them a fine for smoking a cigarette or a fine for not having a mask during the Corona. And instead of giving the fines to the pimps and to the consumers who are the criminals, sometimes the woman in prostitution will be the first one to be violated.

But that's not actual physical. Is there a physical violence of police against women?

Also, I wish the police will open and give us the numbers of how many police officers are taking criminals through their job against women in prostitution and women in general. But we hear. We hear from the testimonies, we hear from them. The meeting with the police officers, it's never on their side. There's so much work we have to do in a matter of enforcement, so much work left to do.

Okay. We've talked a little bit about who these people are, their backgrounds. They're mostly Israelis. It comes from incest, from sexual abuse, from post-trauma. Usually. They're encountering more violence when they're meeting with the clients, whatever they're called. And then they're, in some cases, actually then encountering even more violence when they get into the contact with the police. Now, Israel has what you called before the Norwegian Law. The Norwegians had an interesting take on how to deal with the problem of prostitution, which Israel then adopted. Tell us a little bit about what this Norwegian Law is. What's the logic behind the Norwegian Law? When did Israel adopt it? And how has it worked? Has it had any impact? Has it improved things, made things worse, and so forth?

So five years ago, even more than five years ago, 2018, some sort of a revolution occurred. And for the first time, after lobbying for over 10 years, the law against the consumption of prostitution passed for the first time in Israel through the Norwegian Law, based on the Norwegian Law, saying that the woman in prostitution is the victim, and we should help her, we should provide aid, we should help her with rehabilitation. The one to carry the criminal responsibility is the consumer, the sex consumer, obviously also the pimp, but that was always... That was always illegal. That was always against the law. But since 2020, when the law entered, the consumption of prostitution is illegal in Israel. But you know what? Most men, most people, they don't know. Because when the police doesn't enforce and when the law, unfortunately, is only a temporary law, it ends up in July 25.

Unless it's renewed by the Knesset.

And it will be renewed if it's up to me. We're working on it. But the thing is, people don't know.

Okay, so are men arrested since 2020? We're now in 2025. So it's been four point something years since this law went into.

Well, first of all, they're not arrested. The felony is a criminal felony. But you get a fine.

Okay, so it's not a matter of arrest. It's a matter of fine.

You just get a fine. A 2000 shekels fine. 2,000 shekels fine on your first time, if you come again and you're caught again 4,000 shekels fine, and for the third time and more, 8,000 shekels fine. It's not severe enough.

Okay. Are men fined? Have people been, quote, unquote, arrested and fined for this?

Well, when the law started, then a bit more. Then the police used to enforce more. It was, I remind you, a different government with a different minister.

It wasn't the time of war.

It wasn't the time of war. We did have the Corona. We had some fines, we had some enforcement of the police. Unfortunately, in the past two years, almost nothing. Even though we hear that the consumption rises and the war causes more violence, well, the police enforce less.

So the man who in Israel decides that he's going to go seek prostitution and pay for it and all that really has nothing to worry about from the police, basically, for all intents and purposes.

Nothing to worry about. First of all, they don't know. Second of all, they don't care. And we should really do a process, an educational process with the men. They're not our enemies. We don't see them as enemies. We see them as a part of the change we should do together. And the normative law is just a start. We start with the law. This is our root of change, and then we start the process.

Okay, so you're the CEO of the Task Force on Violence Against Women and Prostitution in Israel. Prostitution is one of the things. Tell me, you're relatively new in the position, a little bit less than a year, eight months or so. You clearly have a strategy in your head. You know what you want to get done in the first couple of years. You know what you want to get done beyond that. How does one in your position sketch out for themselves on a large canvas? Here are the things that my organization, in partnership with other organizations, of course, needs to take on so we can solve, or at least address, not solve, but address the problem of violence against women in Israeli society, of which prostitution is a form, but not the only one. There's domestic violence, there's all sorts of things. What's the Task Force now going to try to do?

So the strategy for five years and for the next year is that we are the only one, the Task Force is the only organization in Israel that fights the sexual abuse in advance, that wants to do the prevention of prostitution, the prevention of sexual abuse and violence. We are the only one working systematically in the Knesset, in the government, try to work with the police on enforcement, educating the public, changing the public minds. This is our strategy for the next five years, how we tackle the industry of sex, how we tackle it, how we fight it, how we prevent the next girl to enter this world.

What are we doing? Are we working in schools? Are we working with Are you working with police forces? Are you teaching police? What are the various ways in which you have a mimshak, interaction within Israeli society? High school kids, soldiers, police, lawyers, judges? Who are the various populations that you're actually trying to work with?

Our work is mostly in the Knesset these days, and we have to say we can have a strategy for the next five years, but the most urgent thing that we have to do is to make sure that the law passes, not as a temporary law, but as a permanent law in the next few months. Because if we don't have the law, then we don't have enforcement, then we can't do education, then we cannot talk to the public. The law is the In the face of everything. We make sure these days we're in the Knesset almost every day talking to Knesset members, talking to ministers, especially the Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, to make sure the law will pass. Once it does, there's other laws should be taken in consideration.

Where is Levin on this issue? Is he supportive?

From what I hear, he is supportive of the law. But the open question is, what kind of a law? Will it be another temporary law or will it be a permanent law?

Why would he not want it to be a permanent law? I mean, even if one doesn't agree with his whole judicial approach and he wants to do judicial reform and he wants to cut back judicial review and he wants to change the appointment of justices, all of that, whatever one thinks about it, should have really no bearing on whether or not you want to protect the weak members of society. This is not a Jewish-Arab thing. It's not an Israeli-Palestinian thing. It really shouldn't be political. So why would somebody like Yariv Levin, who is a lawyer, who is the Minister of Justice, what would be the argument against making it a permanent law?

Well, there's all kinds of technical pragmatic answers for the differences between temporary law and permanent law. Sometimes when you do a temporary law, then there's a research following it where you can see what happens in the field. But my moral answer is that the law is the base, and the permanent law must pass these days, particularly in light of the war. My answer is that there's only one moral answer, and it's a permanent law. Prostitution survivors or the ones that are still in the street, they are looking at the legislator, they are looking at the Knesset, waiting to hear what the Knesset tells them about the violence that occurred in their life almost since they were born, what the state of Israel has to say about the consumption of prostitution. It's different when you say it's forbidden to murder or when you say it's forbidden to murder, meanwhile. It's a whole different line, right?

For the time being, it's forbidden to murder.

You can't rape.

And we'll let you know if we renew the law.

You can't rape or you can't murder, but just in the meanwhile. So no, prostitution is violence, and violence should be illegal for good.

What are the chances of the law passing as a permanent law, do you think?

I'm optimistic. The chances are actually up to me. So I do everything I can every day. Not only myself, we have a brilliant staff that are working every morning in the Knesset to talk about prostitution out loud, to make sure that the Knesset members know all about it, pressuring the minister. I'm optimistic that it will happen as it should be.

Has there been a public campaign to try to make this into a public Israeli subject of discussion? It's obviously expensive to put ads on busses and to put ads on radio and all of that. It's obviously a subject people don't really want their kids seeing on those sides of busses when they're driving around the Ayalon in traffic. I understand that it's very complicated. But has there been an attempt to try to raise the awareness of the Israeli public in general about this problem and the work that you and the task force are doing?

Actually, we just started a new campaign in light of the war. First of all, we understood that the only thing that matters this this day is soldiers in the front and the war going on, and we're all so worried about the war in Gaza. But we know that the PTSD soldiers are more and more suffering, and it's a whole big issue in Israel, actually being more talked out loud. Right.

Even the army is acknowledging it now and talking about it.

It's new days for this issue because usually it was definitely unspoken. We're trying in a new campaign to take soldiers, soldiers that are traumatized and suffering from PTSD, talking about the post-trauma of prostitution survivors, making the audience aware that the post-trauma is just the same one, calling on them to please do not consume. We're trying to get more more and more people in the Israeli public, and I wish we can do a larger campaign, and we need so much help with getting to more and more audiences.

We're going to talk in a minute about how people can help because I'm sure a lot of people will want to. There's this public campaign, there's the Knesset campaign. Let's say things go the way that you would like it to go, and we hope and pray that it will, and the law gets passed in the next few months, re-passed, and now as a permanent law. We've made a social statement to those people who are following and watching. It's not that you can't murder for now, and it's not that you can't rape for now, because those things are always 100% unacceptable. Now, what we're saying is it's also 100% unacceptable to be the consumer of prostitution services because what you're doing is you're contributing to the continuing victimization and traumatization of these women. Let's say we get over this legislative hurdle, and we can make, as we say make a checkmark next to that part of the list. What's the next major agenda item that you and the task force would want to take on to keep addressing a problem, which is obviously not going to go away just because the Knesset passes a law.

Well, we have a few agendas once the law passes. First of all, start a process with the police on enforcement, workshops for police officers, making sure they know the importance, the violence, and they enforce in a right way.

Have you done this before, by the way?

We have.

What's the response from policemen? Are they sitting there thinking, Okay, I got to sit through this because it's an obligatory seminar? Or are they actually taking it seriously when you and others are presenting?

When we bring a prostitution survivor and they hear her herself talking, explaining what she's been through, then their world changes. The only thing is to to get to them, to make the police matter. Once we get there, they listen.

Are the police units open to your bringing people in to talk to them?

Well, at the moment, right now, no. Because of the war, because of the police, because of this government, because of the financial manner.

Before this government, was it easier to get into the police and teach?

Things were much better. Things were much better when the law started. Now, I believe that once the law will pass again, hopefully as a permanent law, we can start again. We can proceed the change and to work with the police, that's one. We have so much more work we can do in the Knesset on other laws. For instance, we have strip clubs that it's only up to the municipality if they're open or closed and they're completely legal in Israel. It's allowed.

But the municipality Tel Aviv or Jerusalem could just shut it down with the passing of local law.

Well, Tel Aviv did. She shut the whole thing down. A few of them were shut down, but they're still legal in a matter of legislation. It's allowed in other cities.

If it's legal, how does Tel Aviv have the right to shut it down?

It's up to the municipality if she gives the approval or she doesn't give the approval for the place or the building. For the use of the location. And Tel Aviv decided to say no, to refuse all the requests, or there's no strip clubs in Tel Aviv, but they're trying. Same people, same men are trying in other cities since it's legal. Sometimes We do. Sometimes it doesn't, but we should make it start. We should make it illegal because we know strip clubs and prostitution is the same. What happens inside the strip clubs is definitely prostitution and definitely illegal.

Okay. Okay. It's illegal because it's prostitution, and prostitution, no matter where it happens, is illegal. Definitely. Okay, so we want to work with the police. We want to try to take on the whole strip club problem.

We want to work with the public a bit. Other laws.

Is there any attempt to work with soldiers for getting out of combat issues? The army is doing a tremendous amount with these soldiers. They've never done in any other war. We know this from friends who are officers and friends who've had kids who've been in these discussions. When they take them out, certainly at the beginning of the war, I don't know if it's going on so much now, but at the beginning of the war, they were doing a lot of seminars about transitioning from the battlefield and the tank and the whatever you were in to now you're going back to the home front. They did all kinds of things. They met with Holocaust survivors to talk about the resilience of the Jewish people. They met with psychologists in some cases. They met with soldiers who'd been in '73 who talked to them about what it was like to come back from the front in '73, Egypt and Syria, and what they went through. I know the army tried all sorts of things. Has the army been open to, and if you guys tried to meet with soldiers who are leaving the battlefield, mostly in Gaza now, but also in the north? Before you go back, this is something you should understand about Israeli society and your own rage, your own anger, your own PTSD. Have you been able to meet with soldiers?

Well, we are meeting with soldiers, and we did the campaign with soldiers that wants to help us to make sure the PTSD they suffer from is not repeating itself over and over again. But we should work with the army once they get in, not even once they get out, because we know from young women telling us their testimonies, we know that the army for young girls at risk, 18 years old, is a place where you can be dragged into prostitution prostitution, and many of them started this life, experiencing violence, being dragged into prostitution when they were soldiers. And the army should know and should deal with that. And we're trying and we're doing our best to get to the officers, to get to the professionals..

Yeah, the officer is at the major officer training camp.

My goal actually is to get to where they train the professionals. They need to have a workshop about prostitution in the army so they know to take care of their female soldiers. Make sure that won't happen. We should work with the army once they're in, even before they get out. Definitely.

Moria, our listeners are probably not a giddily happy hearing this conversation. It's a painful one. It's a hard one. The people that listen to this podcast, typically, are people that care very deeply about Israel. They're left, they're right, religious, secular, young, old men, women, Israelis, not Israelis. But what they have in common, I think, is that they care deeply about Israel. If you care deeply about Israel, this is a hard conversation. This is not part of the Israeli society that you can take great pride in, except the work that you're doing, obviously, people can be enormously proud of. If they want to help, what can they do?

We definitely need everyone's support. We're a small organization, an independent organization. We are not getting any support from the government at all, only from warm-hearted human beings that wants to help. We need a support on our efforts to pass the law before July 25 occurs. We need support with our 22 members of the Coalition Against Prostitution in which we build and hold. We definitely need to support our effort to combat sex trafficking. We have all kinds of initiatives and the new campaign we're just going, we're really trying to get to more and more population. Just because, especially now, after everything we've been through and the sacrifice, the enormous sacrifice that Israel is doing in the battle, soldiers losing their lives and being wounded and suffering, we should, as a society, be worthy of the suffer. The way to be worthy goes exactly through this weakened woman. We cannot be a moral society worthy of the sacrifice they have made, the one who lost their lives, if we don't go through the most weakened women and remember them, this is the only way we can be in full freedom as a moral society in the state of Israel.

It's unbelievably important. The work that you're doing is what you said before. I mean, it's really avodat kodesh. It's really sacred work. I mean, avodat kodesh is actually a classic Jewish category, and it is It's a-tikkun olam, repairing our world and our little slice of this world where we really need to do it. I think your point that the enormous sacrifice that young people are making mandates, it's a command to all of us that we have to be a society that's worthy of the sacrifice that they are making. Even as you and I are sitting here, there are battles raging a 30 minutes drive from here, basically, and we have to be worthy of it. For what you and your colleagues do, the gratitude of all of us who care about this country very deeply. To you personally for your time today to explain to us what's going on, to give us the opportunity to know how to support you and your work. And we're going to put links and all the information people need in the notes for today's episode so that they can follow through. I'm really very grateful. I hope that the next time that you and I sit down for a formal conversation, we can talk about how the law did become a permanent law, how the police attitude began to change, how the numbers are still problematic, but less problematic than they were, and that maybe one day we'll become one of the leading societies in addressing the issue of the weak people in society in general, weak women in society, more particularly, and specifically, weak women who have been dragged into the sex industry, which is by definition, as you pointed out, a form of violence in and of itself. So thank you for what you do.

Thank you, Danny, for this amazing opportunity. And I would like to finish with a quote with a prostitution survivor quote, saying that now, once she's not in this world again, and she was going through a rehabilitation process and got all the help she could get. And she's saying... I do have a choice now. I choose who I'm intimate with and how, and I'm lucky to have a partner who understands that prostitution has had a lasting impact on me. There are still times when my body doesn't fully feel like it belongs to me. It shuts down sometimes because it doesn't want to remember some of the things that have happened to it. But now I have hope.

Od lo avda tikvatenu (our hope is not yet lost). And we're a country in the business of making hope. And with these people, but for these women also.

And with this hope, a minute before Shabbat here in Israel before we go home to Shabbat meal with our loved ones and our family and children. My only request, other than to support the organization, my only request is to remember, to remember all the ones who made their sacrifices for this state, to remember the weakened women that still don't have the freedom to rest in Shabbat, and they're in the street waiting for us to reach out. And this is what we do. And thank you, Danny, for this incredibly beautiful opportunity to talk about such a difficult subject.

Thank you for the work that you do. Thanks for taking the time. Good luck with everything that you do for the sake of the people that you work for, and frankly, for the sake of all of us.

500 days. Get them out of hell.

There must be ways of tracking the mood of a country, its ups and downs, its moments of celebration and its moments of mourning.

Social scientists, I imagine, have their ways of calculating. Perhaps they’re measuring such data even as we speak.

Even those of us who are not social scientists, though, know. We don’t have the data, but we also have no doubt.

Those of us who simply “feel” the country by what’s on TV, what people say on the radio, what fills the OpEd pages of the papers and what’s rampaging through social media, we know—even in a country somewhat relieved to be in at least two ceasefires, something dark has settled over us.

Today is a milestone that, fourteen months ago, no one would have imagined possible. 500 days after October 7th, dozens of Israeli citizens are still in Hamas captivity? Yes, there was some euphoria as the first hostages began to get out a few weeks ago, and yes, every hostage that comes out is a world saved and a family redeemed from hell—but still, we can also feel that the euphoria is ebbing.

Why is that? There are many reasons. Because there’s no denying that all our firepower notwithstanding, it wasn’t us who managed to get them them out, but the new American administration? Because we have little confidence that there will be a Phase II, so we worry about dozens who could be left behind?

Or is it because as the former hostages begin to speak, it’s clear that even those who appeared “OK” as they were paraded across the sickening Hamas stages, are far from OK. So far, in fact, that one wonders who they will be, even year later?

As the country hears about hostages who were kept entirely alone the entire time, who never heard the news, who knew nothing about what had happened to their families, our souls melt. As we hear about elderly hostages, like Keith Siegel, who were fed moldy pita and kicked full force in the ribs for no reason whatsoever, we wonder—what are these people really going to be like five years from now? As we hear of the sick psychological terror that Hamas inflicted on the hostages, it’s hard not to feel entirely overwhelmed by a wave of hate that knows no bounds.

So to mark today’s unbearable milestone, which no words can adequately honor, we’re simply sharing two videos: the one above from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, where Iair Horn, released just days ago, takes to the camera to plead for his brother’s return and can’t get through the words.

And the video below, where women who lost “boyfriends” and thus have little “official” standing (they’re not widows, etc.) reflect on lives that will never be the same, but that somehow, just go on.

On a day like today, on this horrific milestone we’d hoped never to reach, their musings on lives forever altered but that must still move forward are a metaphor for this resilient, remarkable, but also deeply hurting place we call home.

We introduced this series of videos called “Under the Radar” in a post last week.

As we noted there, the entrance to the “Local Testimony” Exhibit at Tel Aviv’s Land of Israel Museum has a huge QR code on the wall, inviting the visitor to watch a series of very brief documentary videos made about all the different groups listed above.

There are many brief documentaries, unfortunately not yet available in English, and they deserve as wide an audience as they can get.

On this 500 day milestone, a reminder of the depths of pain this country is facing, far from the headlines, far from the statistics, but etched so deeply in the soul that the pain will be here for as long as any of us are around.

In a recent Haaretz opinion piece, leading Israeli security expert Chuck Freilich wrote that it’s time to give up on the “mindless ‘two-state solution’ mantra.” There’s no way that Israel will get the security guarantees it needs in a two state solution, so it’s time to get honest and to move on.

That, he believes, is the main contribution of the Trump “Riviera” plan—it’s likely not realistic, but it shakes things up and will now get people to think outside the tired, old box.

In our conversation which covers a lot of territory and a host of issues, Freilich explains the new idea for a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation, what land Egypt gives up, what Israel gives up, what Jordan gives up.

And, he shares his thoughts about the future of Israel, even in these very troubled times.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

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Prof. Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security advisor in Israel and long-time senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, now teaches at Columbia and Tel Aviv University. He is the author of three books on Israeli national security affairs, as well as numerous academic articles, policy studies and op-eds. A frequent commentator on TV and radio, he is a riveting speaker, with a lively and at times irreverent approach to the foibles of Israeli life. A New Yorker by birth, Freilich made aliyah (immigrated) to Israel in his early teens. For a more comprehensive bio, click here.

To read his recent Haaretz article, click here.

To view Chuck’s books, click the images below.

I'm delighted, especially in these confusing and intellectually titillating to have back someone who's been on the podcast many times, someone from whom I always learn and whose appearances on the podcast always elicit many positive responses. Chuck Freilich is a former Deputy National Security Advisor in Israel, a longtime Senior Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, who now teaches at Columbia and Tel Aviv University. He is the author of three books, which we've discussed in the past here on Israeli National Security Affairs, as well as numerous articles, policy studies, op-eds.

We're going to speak actually today about a more recent op-ed of his, which appeared in Haaretz just a week or two ago, which is called "Israel won the war. This is how Trump can help it win the peace," but we're going to come back to that. Chuck's full bio is on the notes for today's session. He is also now a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies here in Israel and is really just one of the most highly regarded experts on Israeli security and related to that, diplomacy and so forth. Delighted to have him back on the program to help us understand what's going on. Chuck, I want to talk about two basic things. One of them is, they're related, but one of them, of course, is the Trump plan. You were quoted in the New York Times a few days ago saying that it's never going to happen, but it's actually a good thing that it's in the mix.

I'd like you to explain at greater length to us today than the New York Times was able to do why you think that is. Then I want to talk about your broader vision for the region. You wrote in Haaretz that it's time to stop, and here's the quote, "a mindless two-state mantra." A two-state solution is not going to happen, but you have in mind something else. I'd like to hear what you think that is, what it would take both on the Israeli side and the Palestinian side for that to even be remotely possible. We have a ton to talk about. Let's get started. First of all, thanks again. Tell us what a thoughtful, moral, Zionist, hopeful person should think and feel as they watch this Trump proposal for Gaza unfold?

Well, first of all, it's good to be back on this program, and thanks for having me. Let me say it's hard in the current political climate in the US to say anything positive about either side because the people on the other side just won't countenance it. Of course, most of the Jewish community is on the democratic left. If Trump comes up with a new idea, people are instinctively against it. I'm not saying that to support the idea because I don't think it is in any a way, a realistic one. I don't think it was thought out. As the President's spokesperson said, it was written as he was speaking.

Do you believe that, by the way? I mean, do you really think he was standing in front of the podium and he, hu shalaf et zeh, as we say in Hebrew, just pulled it out of his pocket?

Well, he was reading at least part of the time from a prepared statement, so it wasn't totally ad-libbed. Trump has the advantage and disadvantage of not really knowing a great deal about what he's talking about at any given moment. Now, two million Palestinians are not going to be transferred from Gaza. It's not going to happen, and nobody's going to support forcibly doing that.

And they don't want to go on their own, right? So you're not voluntarily removing-

I think a fair number actually would like to. Would you really want to go home to a pile of rubble?

Well, No. But let me just say, are you talking about a permanent move or a temporary move? Because if you were going to say a temporary move and I'm going to go somewhere else while the United States and other international forces rebuild Gaza, fine. But I think sometimes we tend to underestimate their attachment to the land and assume that our attachment to the land is a deeply held thing. This is, by the way, Jabotinsky pointed this out more than a century ago or about a century ago. But their love of their land is, I think, as powerful as our love of our land. So, yeah, nobody wants to go back to rubble, but do you think that they would voluntarily move out for good, even a substantial number of them?

I think a substantial number, yes, and I'm not in any way taking away from their commitment to their cause, to their land. I think it's just human nature that at least a certain and not insubstantial number of people would want to dramatically improve their quality of life. Much to my regret, I'm trying to think of a much stronger word, 80,000 Israelis left Israel last year.

And you think that's part of the same thing? They think that they can find a better way of life given that Israel is facing what it's facing now?

Our situation is infinitely better than that of the Gazans. But let me step back for a minute. Trump, in his just shoot in all directions, free-thinking manner, did identify a very, very serious problem that no one has really paid attention to in all of the talk about the two-state solution. Gaza has a population of just over 2 million today. Its population doubles approximately every 20 years, meaning that in 2045, there will be 4 million people there, and in 2065, 8 million, et cetera, et cetera. Gaza is tiny. It isn't viable. It's not a place that people can live in in any semi-decent way in its current borders.

So if one wants to reach, whether it's a two-state solution or some other solution, but a viable one, you have to address that problem. And you can do that either by decreasing Gaza's population, as Trump was indicating, or by expanding Gaza's size. And I'll come back to that. There are ways of doing that. But I think by raising the problem, throwing it out there, and raising an idea which really enraged the Arab world, as anyone who knows anything about the Arab world would understand that it would do, and the Palestinians, first and foremost, he is forcing them to think about the issue and maybe to come up. And he said himself, by the way, at one point, They don't like this, so come back with a different proposal. So from that point of view, I think there is something positive in what he did.

Now, so what you're saying is, look, we're not going to... The current situation is untenable. And as you say in the Haaretz article, what you call the two-state mantra, you call it mindless. In other words, there are certain people certain groups, certain populations, a lot of them Jews, a lot of them Jews in the diaspora, who keep coming back to the two-state solution as being the only equitable way of solving this. And your point in that article, and we'll come back to it, is, come on, guys, give that up. That's just simply not happening.

What you're saying essentially is the current situation is untenable, and it's going to get even more untenable. Two-state solution is pie in the sky, not going to happen in any way as far as the eye can see. Therefore, what Trump has done is to shake things up, to try to everybody to understand business as usual is not going to work. We have to think completely out of the box. Is that a fair assessment of what you're saying so far?

It is. But it's important for me to say I've been a lifelong supporter of the two-state solution. I was coming to the conclusion in the years before the war that it was probably simply no longer a viable option. I think after the war, there's really no prospects for it. To make things simple, it's for one overriding reason. If you ask what does Israel really want in any peace agreement, its ultimate bedrock demand is for guaranteed security arrangements, its inviolate security arrangements. Well, after what happened on October 7th, I don't think anyone in Israel pretty much believes that you can get those kinds of security guarantees on the West Bank border, which abuts all of Israel's population centers. If we can't get security, nobody in Israel is going to agree to a two-state solution.

Okay, so now let's just go back now then. I want to read you something that a well-known American, highly regarded, deeply respected person, wrote on Facebook not that long ago. And I want to actually ask you to respond to it for a second. This person wrote, "Whether or not it is politically viable or just another shot across the bow in this political strategy of creating shock and outrage, I found that watching the American president casually pitching the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from Gaza as a feature of a ludicrous real estate plan to enrich himself and seeing the Prime Minister of Israel smirking alongside him to be just about the most disgraceful and embarrassing thing that I've experienced as an American and as a Zionist."

Do you think people need to feel that way, or is this not ethnic cleansing? Are you not embarrassed by it? I do want to come to your proposal in the Haaretz article in just a second. But I think this person reflected a tremendous sentiment that's out there, that this is appalling, that it's ethnic cleansing, that Israelis are part of it or party to it by either smirking or supporting it. I saw a statistic the other day, I think maybe yesterday, the day before, that 70% of Israelis in some way support this Trump plan.

I don't know what percentage of them think it actually could come to be, But obviously, the further or more on the right you move, the greater is the percentage. And I'm sure among Smotrich and Ben Gvr voters, it's 100% of people, basically, or 98% of people who support this. But do you share the sense that we, as caring moral Jews, ought to be deeply discomfited by Trump saying this at this point?

First of all, I saw that statistic as well, but the other one was that a majority did not believe that it was a viable proposal.

That's important, by the way. I think our listeners ought to listen to that very carefully. In other words, 70% are saying, I like the plan, and more than half, which has got to be 50, 55% at least, are saying, I also know that it can't happen. In a certain way, what they're saying is what you're saying. I like this because this is mixing up the bag a little bit and it's getting us to think out of the box, not because most people here actually think it's going to happen, but respond to this notion of this very well-respected American Jewish leader who says that he found this Bibi smirking, quote, unquote, next to Trump to be one of the most morally complicated and uncomfortable moments he's ever had as an American Zionist.

I didn't see Bibi smirking, but there's no doubt that many people in Israel were very, very happy to hear this proposal. And you mentioned the statistic. I think the point is that people want to see a solution to Gaza. We've tried the two-state solution for a few decades. It hasn't worked. We have had umpteen rounds with Hamas now, and we reached the horror of October 7th. I'm not sure that people in the US are actually quite sure that they do not fully appreciate the impact that that has had on Israel. The fact that even the Jews who are very involved in Israeli affairs, but when you live in the US, you can't appreciate it. Israel is still in a state of post-trauma. If you watch television, Israeli TV, every night, both the news and all the various news kinds of programs, of which there are endless ones, weekly documentaries about the war. It's all about the war, about the hostages, about the horror of October 7th. This is a country which is still, as I said, in post-shock, post-trauma. People want to see a different outcome now. I don't think what Trump was talking about was ethnic cleansing.

He was looking at what... Look, you can make the case that it was actually, in some ways, almost a moral proposal because he was talking maybe a temporary, not permanent. He didn't really think this through, but he was going to rebuild Gaza, and at least some of the people could come back. But there have been population transfers in the past all over the world. It's not accepted today. Okay, a lot of things aren't accepted today, but the things that are accepted or more accepted haven't worked. The entire world has come to speak about the two-state solution for the last 20 to 30 years. In Europe, it's longer than that. In the US, the first President to talk about a two-state solution, to say openly a Palestinian state, was Bush, Bush II, and Clinton was really talking about it. He just didn't say it explicitly. So even in the US, it's maybe 20 to 30 years. Before that, people talked about different solutions.

There's nothing holy about the two-state solution. The only thing that, to my way of thinking that is holy is separating from the Palestinians so that we can remain a overwhelmingly, not 100%, it'll only be 80%, but an overwhelmingly Jewish Israel and a democratic Israel. The process of nation building is messy and it's painful in all cases, and it includes questionable moral things. What happened on October 7th wasn't moral either. To put it mildly. And we have to make sure that there is no further October 7th. Hamas has repeatedly stated its commitment to trying. And of course, they are already reconstituting, even before we've fully withdrawn from Gaza. So it's very easy from afar to pontificate. And I don't disagree that this is a morally questionable issue. But I think one can also try and see what positive side might come out of it.

Okay. I actually think that this embracing of the morally complex is something that has... It's a skill in life in general that the current world does not, I think, naturally tend towards. It doesn't matter whether you're a right or left, Jewish or not Jewish, Jewish or Arab, religious or secular. Embracing the world of moral complexity is just simply something that we've stopped learning how to do. I think your point here that there's no easy solution to this. There's no morally neat solution to this. We're going to have to actually now wade into muddy and complex waters. I think that's an unbelievably important point that people don't enough, and I'm thrilled that you said it.

Let's turn now to a piece that you had in Haaretz about, I guess, two weeks ago, a little bit less than two weeks ago. It's called Israel won the war. This is how Trump can help it win the peace. It's trying to revisit the idea for Jordanian-Palestinian Confederation, and the US President Donald Trump's as yet half-baked, but axiom-breaking diplomatic approach may actually help. You have a whole vision here for how this could work out very differently.

Now, a lot of people said when Trump was talking about moving to a lot of Palestinians to Jordan, a lot of people immediately said, Well, that's a terrible idea for Israel, because then the Hashemite minority will no longer be able to rule Jordan. You've got an enormous Jordanian state, which is now a Palestinian state. It's the last thing that Israel needs on its longest border is a Palestinian state with the king deposed. So moving Palestinians to Jordan is a terrible idea, people said. But you have something very different in mind. Take us through the proposal as you have it, and let's understand of how your idea might bring us to a very different vision of the Middle East?

It's actually a three-part proposal, and it's a combination of existing ideas. None of these is a novel idea of mine, it's maybe putting it together that makes it a new approach. The first part is to say that there would be a confederation between the Jordanians, all of Jordan, and the Palestinians. That would be on 90 plus percent of the West Bank and Gaza. Now, if Israel has to keep, depending on which expert political figure you wish to speak to, between 4, 5, and 10% of the West Bank. Then we can keep 80% of the settlers and have greater security margins.

Let me just make sure that everybody understands. What you're saying is that if we wanted to keep 80% of the Israelis who now live over the Green Line in the West Bank in their homes without moving them, all that we have to hold on to is about 4 to 5% of the actual square kilometrage of that area. That's your basic point, right? The Confederation would be Jordan. It would be, let's say, 90 something % of the West Bank. I'm assuming basically 100 % of Gaza, except for a security area that we would hold here or there, right?

Correct. All right.

Now, what does this Confederation mean?

Okay. It means, in essence, two independent states, except that they share foreign and defense policy. Now, for Jordan, this is an idea is a total nonstarter. They will be against it vociferously. And so what I also did is to try and propose a number of ideas so that it would not constitute a threat to the Hashemite Kingdom. Just to the opposite, it would guarantee its future.

How's that?

Okay. People have been forecasting the demise of the Hashemite Kingdom ever since it was established 100 years ago, and paradoxically, it's turned out to be the most stable Arab state. But Jordan's population is well over half Palestinian. The king's wife, Queen Rania, is Palestinian, meaning that the king's heir is half Palestinian. Jordan's future, I believe, is a Palestinian future. And the kingdom is, from their perspective, rightfully worried that they don't have a long-term future. So if we went with this Confederation idea, the Constitution would state that the Jordanian component, the Jordanian substate, remains the Hashemite Kingdom forever. It would give the King various emergency powers. It would give him a veto power. And there would be other, we don't have time to fully develop, there would be other measures taken so that it would ensure Jordan's future as Jordan.

If Jordan does not accept a proposal as being something which is favorable to them, then it's not something we can do because Jordan's long-term existence is a fundamental Israeli interest. But if we can convince them, okay, then we can go ahead. For the Palestinians, it just about gives them a fully independent state. They would have full responsibility over domestic affairs, and they would just have to agree to joint governance with the Jordanians on foreign and defense affairs. I think for the Palestinians, this isn't easy to accept, but it's certainly far easier than for the Jordanians. It certainly is no doubt that it's far better than anything else that may get in the foreseeable future.

Now, in this picture, is Gaza economically independent? In other words, they have to raise their own money and spend their own money. The budget is entirely theirs, or are they sharing a budget with Jordan?

Well, they certainly share a budget with the West Bank, with the Palestinian State. No, the two states have their own budgets, I would imagine. Of course, there are a thousand and one details that would have to be worked out between the sides. But I imagine that their budget would be a joint, or a Palestinian one, it would be joint with the West Bank.

And is there any way the way people can get from Gaza to the West Bank?

Yeah. That's one of the accepted ideas ever since the Oslo days is that there would either be an overhead highway or an underground highway crossing Israel. It's about 30 odd miles, the whole thing, and it can be done. Okay. It's not cheap, but it can be done. That's the first part.

A cynic could say, We have a lot of tunnel building experience in this region anyway.

Certainly, Hamas does, and that can be their contribution to this. That's the first part, is the Confederation. But getting back to what I was saying before, that Gaza is simply not tenable as a place to live in the long run in its current borders. This brings me to the idea of a multilateral land swap. Here it may get a little bit complicated for listeners.

This is the second part of the proposal, right?

The second part. The idea would be that Egypt gives Gaza additional land, maybe doubles its size.

From Sinai, presumably, right?

Correct. Yes. Along the Gaza-Sinai border. Now, Egypt loses territory, so why would they do that? Okay, so Israel compensates them with equal-sized territory from the Negev. So now the Gazans have gained territory. Egypt has given and received, so it's a net exchange for them. But Israel has lost territory. And here is where the Palestinians would then compensate Israel by giving it territory in the West Bank, equal in size to the territory that Israel gave to Egypt, that Egypt gave to Gaza.

Okay, The point here is that nobody actually gains or loses net territory, but the Palestinians and the Israelis gain the territory that is of absolute critical importance for them. It's not as if the Palestinians don't need territory in the West Bank. They, of course, do. It's not that big. But where they really need territory is in Gaza. This is an idea, by the way, that was raised to them a couple of decades ago in the negotiations, and they said, Yeah, interesting idea. The place that Israel needs territory is along the border in the West Bank so that we can incorporate the 80% of the settlers. Here is a way of doing that. So that's the second component.

Now, I just want to ask you one question before you get to the third part. Palestinians are very, very sensitive about the proportion of land that they thought that they were getting before, let's say, even the Balfour Declaration or whatever. They're very, or certainly Peel Commission, et cetera, the Partition Plan in '47. They've always watched and saw what percentage of the land they're getting. It's not exactly the case that nobody's losing land here because net, the Palestinians in the West Bank are losing land. In other words, unless they think of themselves as being one and the same as Gaza, they're saying, So Gaza gains land, Egypt loses. Egypt gets the land back from the Israelis along the Negev side. The Israelis make up the land by getting part of the West Bank. Where do we on the West Bank get the part that we're giving up? What would you say to them if they said that?

Well, the question here is whether there is a Palestinian people or whether there are two Palestinian peoples, a West Bank and a Gazan people.

What do you What do you think the answer to that is, by the way?

Well, I think there are differences. The West Bankers are more like, I don't want to say rich uncles, but they're at least the better off ones. Look, this idea was raised the Palestinian negotiators, and they found it quite interesting. I mean, nothing was agreed, so this wasn't agreed either. But they understand the issue certainly as well as I do, probably far better. And I think this is a proposal which....It's obviously problematic because they don't want to give up an inch of the West Bank. And as you're indicating, this conflict has been going on for over 100 years over territory. But there is a very important net gain for them here.

Who came up with this? You said this was originally proposed to them, and the negotiators said it was worth talking about. Who proposed it to them, and when was this?

Well, there were two people who were particularly associated with or came up with the idea. The original one was Professor Ben-Arieh from Hebrew U. Then, Giora Eiland, who was the head of the National Security Council in the early 2000s, picked up the idea and expanded upon it a bit. I believe that he raised it before the Palestinians, and certainly others did, so that it got an airing.

Okay. Now, Let's go to part three.

Part three is, I don't think that any of this is feasible for the moment. We're going to need a change of leadership in Israel. We're going to need an even greater change in leadership on the Palestinian side because we're going to need them to reunite, to have one West Bank, Gaza, one Palestinian leadership. And it has to finally become a pragmatic leadership that's willing to make some of the hard decisions and not just leave it to Israel to make hard decisions. In the same way that we're not going to have a two-state solution for the foreseeable future, the Confederation idea and the land swap is not going to happen tomorrow either. I think that, and again, the Israeli population is so shocked by what happened on October 7th. This has had such an impact. The entire public has moved to the right, the left is further to the right than it was two years ago as well, and for good reason. The most that I can see anybody really being willing to do for the foreseeable future is the idea of civil disengagement. Here, Israel would again decide what percentage of the West Bank it intends to keep, somewhere between the 4 to 10%, and it begins withdrawing the settlers from the remaining 90 something %, but the IDF remains deployed as it deems necessary and for as long as necessary throughout the West Bank.

And this is a way to begin the process of separating from the Palestinians and of preserving our Jewish and democratic character. That's its real importance. The other thing is, I just think it's the most that the traffic may possibly be able to bear.

While that's happening on the West Bank, what happens in Gaza?

That does not solve the Gaza problem. In the meantime, we have to try and....I mean, we withdrew from Gaza already once. That didn't work.

Yeah, we've been there, done that.

Exactly. That didn't work. The solution to Gaza, pending a permanent status agreement....The question is what the solution is, and I'm not sure at this point. Obviously, we're going to need... I don't think there's any alternative but to bring the PA back in, the Palestinian Authority, for all of its corrupt and incompetent nature. But that is the only recognized semi-legitimate Palestinian leadership. They're going to need a great deal of backing from Arab countries, from the international community. I'm not sure that anyone is really going to ante up when the time comes, because are you willing to send troops into harm's way to help Gaza? I don't see anybody really doing that. The UAE claims that they're willing to, okay, maybe. But beyond them, I don't really see anyone else. We'll have to see. Certainly, in the end, Israel is going to be responsible for security in Gaza, one way or the other.

Which leads me to my next, which is exactly the question I wanted to ask you. We've seen sickening, cynical, gut-wrenching displays of all sorts of things with the hostages being released. We saw a couple of cases where hostages literally thought they were about to get killed by a mob. The look of terror on their faces was just... It was beyond. It was beyond disgusting. Israel laid down the line and made it clear that that could simply not happen again, and so far it hasn't. But we've seen emaciated people basically pulled up onto a stage who looked nothing like the people that they were when they were taken in almost 500 days ago. We've just seen horrible displays. But one of the things that we've seen is a Hamas that looks very much in charge. The Hamas fighters don't look emaciated, and the Israeli broadcasters always like to say, Look at all these Hamas fighters. These are the cowards. These are the ones who sat it out during the war, knowing that that way they wouldn't be killed. They were waiting for this moment, but you're looking at is Shfanim, rabbits who went and hid, et cetera.

I find that a little bit interesting and a little bit irrelevant. In other words, what we are seeing is a huge show of force by Gaza. Israeli sources are saying that Hamas is actually rebuilding itself and recruiting people, albeit younger, recruiting thousands of people on an ongoing basis. My question to you is, has Hamas been defeated? Can Hamas be defeated? How long are we going to be at this, if you had to guess, obviously, nobody knows. But a large part of this presumes, a large part of your proposal, which is fascinating, presumes that somehow the Hamas problem goes away, that we're not still at war with Hamas. That Hamas is still not digging tunnels. Hamas is not trying to destroy Israel. Where are we with Hamas and where can we get with Hamas?

That's a really tough question that everyone in Israel is thinking about, and I have yet to hear the brilliant solution to it. Look, did we defeat Hamas militarily? I think the answer is yes. Did we eradicate Hamas? No, militarily. Did we defeat them politically? No, they're still in political control. And to the extent that we weaken them politically, they're building back again. They're going to need it back again. I'm not impressed by the big displays that they're putting on. This is propaganda. Yeah, they've recruited a few thousand young, untrained fighters who certainly don't have the equipment that Hamas had a year ago.

They don't have the entire tunnel system. They still have some of it, but they don't have most of the tunnel system that they had a year ago. They don't have the rocket capability. They've got a fraction of it. If from any traditional standard of military victory, Hamas has been defeated. The problem with organizations like Hamas and like Hezbollah is that for them, there is no such thing as defeat. As long as one of them is still alive, the idea is still alive, then they'll continue the fight. Because remember, this isn't a war between two normal states, where in the end, everybody knows the wars are going to end. There's going to be some peace agreement, better or worse. For Hamas and Hezbollah, the only end game is Israel's destruction. So can we eliminate them? Can we achieve what the Prime Minister calls a total victory?

The answer is no. On the other hand, where we might have been able to do considerably better is had we agreed pretty much from the beginning to start talking about a new alternative government in Gaza, and it's not going to be great shakes no matter what happens there. It's probably going to be the PA. But had we been willing to do that, then there would be an alternative. Today, there is only one political force in Gaza, that's Hamas. People are still living under the same threat of the gun that they did before the war. So even those who want to speak out, and there are many of them, some have, but obviously, people are terrorized. It's not just that we're not the only ones who face terror. The people who really face Hamas terror are Gazan civilians. So that was a huge mistake on Israel's part. And that's the difference between being able to really achieve an overall victory, it would never have been 100%, and a limited military one. And in the end, it'll take them a long time to rebuild to what they I don't know if they'll be able to ever to get back to what they had before the war.

But we're not going to let them, are we? We're going to try to make sure that doesn't happen, obviously. That's why I'm thinking. That's just not going to happen.

Right. But in the end, was this war, this long, painful, really horrible war for everyone, was it, in the end, just another bigger round in this endless series of rounds, or was this something that really changes things? That's largely up to us. I don't think it's completely too late to change the situation. Maybe it could still be done, but the Prime Minister doesn't seem to be willing to change his approach. And in the end, this victory may not look like that at the end of it. By the way, the question is, there's the other question is, will we be able to take advantage of the victory over Hezbollah in Lebanon and the defeat of the Iranian Axis, the Axis of Resistance? Iran itself was greatly weakened. These are, in some ways, even bigger questions.

I want to end with this. Look, you made aliyah as a teenager. You've been here for a very long time. This country and its future has been your life's work. This is really the passion of your life behind your family. This is the most important thing to you. But you have pointed out over the course of our conversation that some 80,000 people have left, that there is a sense of fragility to the social contract. This government is not going anywhere in the near term. Hamas is badly damaged, but it's not defeated. The two-state solution is not viable, but this plan that you've proposed in Haaretz, which is not, as you said yourself, not entirely only your plan, but it's pieces of a puzzle that you put together, may be a very good idea, but it's not happening anywhere in the immediate future. When one puts all of this together, Chuck Freilich is Israeli, Jewish person, moral person, so on and so forth. How optimistic are you about the future of this country?

In the end, I'm quite optimistic. Look, we're going through a very bad period. There's no doubt about it. We've gone through bad periods in the past. We had a couple of decades when for all of the... In some ways, they were very painful, but in some ways, they were good in the sense that we came to take Israel's existence for granted. And that's a nice thing to be able to do it, but it was a little bit early. We thought that the conflict was behind us for all practical purposes, and we got a rude awakening. The fact is, Israel is a regional power. We are stronger than we ever were. I think we've restored our confidence, by the way, after October 7th. We have an economy which is just a marvel. And despite everything, we will continue to grow and become stronger, I believe. I am very worried about the issues that you mentioned, the social contract, with the impact of what the next elections may be, but I do believe it looks like Naftali Bennett is going to run, and all the polls show him totally changing the picture. I certainly do not agree with some of his basic policies, but there's no doubt that he would be a very welcome change. And I think he can begin the healing process that we will really need. It's healing way beyond October 7th. It's a national revival, a national renaissance that is necessary. I believe that it can happen. I always rely on the yihiyeh tov element of it, the old Israeli solution to all problems. Yihiyeh tov, it'll be good. It'll work itself out one way or the other. I think in the end, we have a good Israeli and Jewish future here.

It's not, I think, an accident at all, but one of the songs that's come out of this period that everybody's singing these days is Yihiyeh Tak Tov, and it's going to be tov yoter, It's going to be okay, it's going to be better than okay, it's going to keep getting better. There's something about that that is as basic to Israel as is the social contract that we've been talking about. I think that despite all of the evidence to the contrary that you quite rightly adduce, there's nothing actually totally inconsistent about both looking at that evidence at one the one side and believing in a bright future on the other side. As you point out, in 1945, there was no real reason to think that you and I would be having the conversation that we're having now. In 1945, this country would have been unimaginable. I'll just end with perhaps one little curiosity that I was reading about yesterday for reasons that don't matter right now. In 1945, Louis Finkelstein, who was the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, was asked by students at JTS, which is the intellectual academic cornerstone of the Conservative movement. He was asked, this is in May '45, four months after Auschwitz is liberated.

He's asked for the seminary to play Hatikvah in 1945 at the graduation ceremony, and he absolutely refuses. It causes a whole brouhaha. At the end of the day, what they did is they went across the street to Union Theological Seminary where the Christians students were, and the Christians played Hatikvah on the chimes that could be heard outside across Broadway on 121st Street, so that Hatikvah was played only by Union Theological, not by Jewish Theological. But when Finkelstein was interviewed by Time magazine at that time and asked why it was that he did not want Haktivah played, what he said was there is not a chance that a Jewish state is going to be created at any time in the foreseeable future. This was 1945. Obviously, here you and I, it was created three years later. Here you and I are in 2025. Not all that much later. It's 80 years. The world is entirely different. I think, again, we have to have the capacity to see that even in dark moments, there is potential here that is unlimited, that the Jews have always somehow managed to pull that proverbial rabbit out of the proverbial hat. So for your explaining to us both the realities on the ground, but to say to us, in spite of all of that, that you're deeply optimistic about the future of the state, I think is really the quintessential Zionist combination of looking very carefully at facts and challenges, and at the same time, believing that great things are still to come. It's always a privilege. It's always a pleasure to learn from you and to be the beneficiary of your expertise. Chuck Freilich, thank you very much once again for joining us on Israel from the Inside.

Thank you. It's a pleasure being here.

It translates as follows:

Over the past year, we spoke with dozens of young people and asked to hear their stories as they are, without filters. Evacuees, survivors of the massacre, bereaved families, widows, reserve soldiers – the stories they told us are stories of friendship, courage, resilience, and of a generation that sees without illusions.

This project is our way of documenting what happened here over the past year and giving a moment to people who are the future of this country. We invite you to open your hearts and listen to them.

At the entrance to the “Local Testimony” Exhibit at Tel Aviv’s Land of Israel Museum which we posted about yesterday, there’s a huge QR code on the wall, inviting the visitor to watch a series of very brief documentary videos made about all the different groups listed above.

The QR code works even off a screen (we tested it), so I encourage you to take a look at the variety of truly fabulous brief films that have been uploaded.

There’s a brief introduction, in English too, as part of the entrance:

For who who don’t speak Hebrew, we’ve taken one of the very brief clips and added subtitles so a much wider audience can appreciate the hearts and souls of these young people. I found that it takes viewing it more than once to allow the magnitude of what they’re saying to really seep in.

This is a deeply scarred nation, as one of the participants actually points out, but also an extraordinary one. With the region still in turmoil, it’s worth hearing the voices of those who were most deeply and immediately affected, and to ask ourselves—what will this nation be like, given what its future leaders have all endured?

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Comparisons like these flooded Israeli social media:

The same image came to mind for everyone we spoke to — these men looked like Holocaust survivors.

Israelis were in tears. Israelis called for revenge. And then, most took a deep breath, and said, “Let’s get them all out first. Then we’ll get revenge.”

Whatever that looks like. Whatever that’s worth.

One of the three hostages released is Or Levi, who was in the same small cement shelter at the Nova festival on October 7th in which Aner Shapira and Hersh Goldberg-Polin had sought safety.

If you don’t recall the story of what unfolded there, and of Aner’s unfathomable heroism, here is the story one more time.

That is why the newscasters brought Shira Shapira, Aner’s mother, on line after Shabbat to share her reactions. Or Levi came out of captivity because her son saved his life.

After she shared her thoughts and reactions, as you can hear at the top, the three newscasters were somewhat at a loss for words.

Look very carefully at their eyes.

Every one of them was on the verge of tears, or beyond that.

And then, as Ben Caspit, one of the newscasters, put it in a line that few will soon forget:

“It’s simply shocking. But what a privilege it is to be part of this people.”

Indeed.

Part of the shock and horror of the evening stemmed from the image and story of Eli Sharabi, seen here meeting up with his family for the first time. We didn’t subtitle it, because none of the words make any difference:

if you look carefully, none of the hospital staff touches any of the hostages until the hostages specifically request that they do. It’s part of putting the now former hostages back in control. They determine who does and doesn’t touch them, and when.

The weeping in the picture above is first because Eli Sharabi had been gone for so long, because he is barely recognizable as the human being he was when he was stolen from his home. ….

… and because it is up to those people hugging him to somehow break the news that his wife and two daughters, pictured below, were killed on October 7. He had no idea. He had not heard any news at all from the outside ever since October 7, and the first thing that he said to the IDF soldiers who received him from the Red Cross was that he was anxious to see his wife and kids.

One can imagine the searing pain for even the soldiers who were told that under no circumstances were they to say anything about that.

It was a painful, enraging evening, in which the joy we all felt that three families were reunited was hugely dented by the agony that these reunions heralded, by the horrifying condition these men are in … and by our wondering — since every week has gotten worse — what we’re going to see next week.

Why do 70% of Israelis support Trump’s (pie in the sky) plan to disperse the Palestinian people? Because 70% of Israelis believe that the Palestinians are hopelessly and irredeemably evil.

A nation held back tears last night, and curbed its rage.

Not too deep down, though, despite the storm of emotions, many of us resonated to what it was that Ben Caspit said, as he held back tears:

Not “even now,” but rather “especially now,” what a privilege it is to be part of this people.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

It’s gotten more than a few chuckles out of Israelis as it’s made its way across social media, but not much more than a chuckle—because the whole International Red Cross thing and the staged “ceremonies” the hostages are forced to endure upon their release are so utterly sickening and abusive.

Thankfully, the IRC video was hardly the only one that made its way around Israeli social media this week. Another one, which we’ve subtitled for our readers, is of Naamah Levy, having left the hospital, returning to her home in Raanana with her father.

She doesn’t look like she is entirely comfortable with all the attention and the crowd around the car, but was without question better than the last time the car she was in was surrounded by a crowd:

Even a video like that, though, is not without controversy, out of the best of intentions.

Israelis have been asked to respect the privacy of the returned hostages—not to share information about their medical condition or to guess about it, not to spread rumors about what they endured in captivity, and the like. By and large, the public has been pretty disciplined about this, as has the press.

But the limits of what’s appropriate are increasingly the subject of intense debate. A different segment of the same Eretz Nehederet episode included an AI-generated image of Liri Elbag, another hostage who has been described as having exhibited extraordinary fortitude in captivity and is seen by the others as having kept them going.

The image enraged some journalists:

The Maariv columnist wrote, “Keshet [the TV channel that hosts and produces Eretz Nehederet] has lost its mind. My eyes could not believe what you did.”

Why?

In the image, Elbag is standing at the Knesset plenum, with a “subtitle” that reads, “Liri Elbag, Prime Minister.”

The columnist wrote, “This time my eyes couldn't believe that it was a shocking artificial intelligence video featuring the hostages, in a take that completely romanticizes the poor people who have just been released from captivity and their family members.”

Personally, I don’t share the critique. I didn’t think the show romanticized anything at all, and if anything, I assume that the recently released women would prefer to be thought of as potential Prime Ministers than as “poor people who have just been released.”

But maybe I’m wrong.

It’s a good debate to have. The hostages are not going to disappear from Israeli news any time soon, and what the limits of decent discourse are is a conversation worth having.

It’s worth having, no less, because it’s something that we control, and it’s an issue that will say something about the character of our society.

The American President’s totally unrealistic plans to move millions of people say a lot about him, not about us.

We’re better off, I think, thinking about the kinds of people we want to be, and to leave DJT’s machinations to the people who elected him.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

I then had an opportunity to discuss with book with Melanie for a Beit Avi Chai podcast (video below), and we’re sharing that with you today, with my thanks to Melanie for the invitation to spend that time with her.

First, though, the video above and the front page of Yedi’ot Ahronot below.

The video, which has gotten a lot of play in the press and on social media, is of Agam Berger, released from Hamas captivity last week, five days after the other four spotters were released (only after Liri Albag, who refused to be released without Agam, was tricked into moving to a different space so that Agam spent five days alone, with no knowledge of whether she’d really be released as promised). Agam’s younger sister, Bar, was completing an army course, and Agam went to the ceremony to place the aiguillette on her sister’s shoulder.

It’s lovely, obviously, but it’s really much, much more than that.

Take a look at these five women on the front page of Friday’s paper. It’s not just that they’re back from 480+ days of utter horror in Hamas cages, tunnels or apartments under the guard of barbarians (their stories are must-reads).

It’s that these are the very women who warned in October 2023 that Hamas was preparing for something big. They were doing precisely what they were trained to do, and then, when they saw something amiss, they reported it.

But no one paid attention to them. Perhaps because they were young, low on the IDF totem pole, perhaps because are women, perhaps both, perhaps something else. Had anyone listened to them carefully, we might not be in this war. Had anyone listened to the women in this photo, thousands and thousands of people who are dead might well still be alive.

But not only were they ignored, they were essentially sacrificed. They warned about the danger, no one listened, and just as awful, no one sent anyone to protect them. Because there was virtually no one there to protect their outpost, fifteen other spotters, just like them, were slaughtered that day, and these women were taken hostage.

In this photo on Friday’s front page, the five are finally reunited in the hospital. And in the video at the top of the post, Agam, just days after being released, attends a ceremony at the base of the same army that utterly abandoned her.

These women are a reminder of what this country is still made of.

Look at that photo. It’s our future.

And then there’s this page from the inside of Friday’s paper, because five Thai workers were also released after 480+ days in captivity. What in the world did Hamas hold on to them for? The barbarity is unspeakable.

Finally, though, they are thankfully out, and while Israelis’ attention was naturally focused on the Israelis who were released this week, the press made a point of paying attention to the Thais, too.

The Thai reads, “We’re waiting for them all to come home,” which is precisely what the Hebrew in the black and yellow to the right says.

Amen to that.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

And now, with thanks again to Melanie Phillips and Beit Avi Chai, my conversation with Melanie about her powerful new book.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author, who now lives in Jerusalem. Her weekly column, which currently appears in The Times of London, has been published over the years in the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and Daily Mail. She writes for the Jerusalem Post and Jewish Chronicle, is a regular panelist on BBC Radio's The Moral Maze and speaks on public platforms throughout the English-speaking world.

Her best-selling book Londonistan, about the British establishment's capitulation to Islamist aggression, was published in 2006 by Encounter. She followed this in 2010 with The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, with a foreword by David Mamet and also published by Encounter. The updated edition of Guardian Angel, her memoir, was published in August 2016.

In the video above, Aviva Siegel’s daughter, Shir (to whom Aviva refers as “Shirkush”), filmed her mother watching that same video. As you may recall, Aviva was released in the first hostage exchange, some 50 days after October 7, while her husband, Keith, is still a hostage in Hamas captivity.

Shir posted the above video. It doesn’t need much commentary.

“It simply has to happen,” Aviva says. She’s right. Keith (and the others) simply need to come home.

According to rumors, Keith may be the third hostage to be released this Thursday.

I urge you to watch this very brief clip of a longer interview that Aviva gave not long ago to Marc Beckman.

And then try to make the time to watch the entire video below. Her descriptions of how the captors treated them and what they went through even in the first hours and days of captivity is stunning—and reminds us of why everything single one of them needs to get out.

Watch it, and keep in mind that even if this deal goes through, there will still be sixty something hostages left in Hamas’ brutal hands.

“It will happen, Mom, it will happen,” Shir says to her mother.

We can only pray that by Friday, for this one family, hell will have ended.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Last week, I shared a video of Columbia University, at which some pro Palestinian protesters had entered a class on Israel, interrupted, posted materials and violated the most fundamental norms of behavior for an academic institution.

I remarked that from the video, it appeared that the professor had done nothing while they were there. It turns out that that was not correct, and I’m grateful to a senior administrator at Columbia for reaching out and filling me in.

First, I didn’t recognize the professor as Avi Shilon, the author of a superb biography of Menachem Begin (in addition to other works, who was also enormously helpful to me as I was writing my own book on Begin).

Second, it turns out there was an exchange between Shilon and the protestors, about which you can read in these two places, among others:

…. and this article in the Times of Israel:

Columbia has so far suspended one student, pending a fuller investigation. Whether the University will do the right thing and permanently expel all the students who were involved obviously remains to be seen.

Israel has become an emotional rollercoaster, again.

Yoni Bloch, not as well known outside Israel as he deserves to be, is a hugely popular Israeli musician, songwriter, composer, rock singer—and of course, what else—a hi-tech entrepreneur.

Interestingly, tech also had major influence on Bloch’s music career. He first started posting his song on the website known as Bama Hadasha (“New Stage”), which allows aspiring artists to publish their work—be it prose, poetry, art, or music—online. The daughter of the chairman of the record company NMC heard Bloch's songs on the site and introduced his music to her father. In a short while, Bloch's music career took off, and his work is regularly featured on Israeli radio.

Today, we’re sharing a new instance of the intersection of Bloch’s music and his tech interests. Bloch recently released a new single, called “Sof Tov,” or “A Good Ending.” It’s an unbridled, hopeful description of a future Israel, and it has taken the country by storm.

The song is fun and is played everywhere. But what really got the song its traction is an AI-generated video of the future that Bloch also released.

At the very top of this post is the original video, and below, we’ve inserted a YouTube someone else made with an explanation of what all the images mean. They’re clear to Israelis, but less so to those who don’t live here. So the video explains much, and to fill in the picture further, we’ve also added some stills from the video with explanations, too.

First, though, the song. The following is an AI-generated translation of the Hebrew lyrics.

Maybe we'll just start with a good ending And go back in time We'll post pictures on the street Of everyone we brought back from there We'll start after there's already peace And we just need to finalize some details We'll invite all the residents of the north To a sanity party in Re'im Other than that, there's nothing to talk about Other than that, it won't help One thing will work out And another will pass Other than that, we're already here And we have nowhere to leave to So even if we don't achieve anything At least we'll start with a good ending Maybe we'll go back to arguing about nonsense Get stuck in traffic every morning Watch half an hour of news And a Bruno performance in the park We'll be able to fly wherever we want And then come back home, because it's over If someone asks "What's up?" We'll tell them that now it's allowed Other than that, there's nothing to talk about Other than that, it won't help One thing will work out And another will pass Other than that, we're already here And we have nowhere to leave to So even if we don't achieve anything At least we'll start with a good ending Other than that, time is already up And we have nowhere to leave to We've talked about every ending in the world At least we'll start with a good ending Other than that, we're already here And we have nowhere to leave to So even if we don't achieve anything At least we'll start with a good ending

Now, here’s that other video with explanations that someone posted:

And finally, some further explanations:

* The writing on the highway, which was often blocked by protesters, now reads “The Last War,” a reference to Yehoram Ga’on’s song, “I promise you, my little girl, that this was the last war.”

* The yellow ribbon, the symbol of the “bring the hostages home movement,” is removed from the car door handle, because it’s no longer necessary. They’re home, as Bloch’s lyrics say.

* A reservist’s IDF call-up letter

* Protesters against judicial reform sign placards

* Throughout 2023, until the war, lines of buses were used to bring people to anti-judicial reform protests. Now they’re bringing people from the north to a “sanity party” at Re’im, the site of the Nova massacre

* Dome of the Rock in peacetime

* “How good it is that you’re all home.” Shoppers in a store watching the news of the return of the last of the hostages

* A photo of the mass anti-judicial reform protest has been transformed into a celebration of the hostages’ return

* Words at the bottom read: “All the hostages are now in Israel”

* “Finally, they’re home”

* “All the hostages are on the way to their families”

* Instead of being about hostages, the big ads on the sides of Tel Aviv buildings are now about a Taylor Swift concert.

* The portable bathrooms are for the Taylor Swift concert, presumably. They’re reminiscent of the Nova music festival victims, who hid in them, but were killed as Hamas terrorists shot through them with automatic weapons.

* A sign that says, “Discover Beirut $199”

* The Dome of the Rock is now not the scene of Israeli police having to subdue rock throwers, but something very different

* Form exempting reservists from further service

* The IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, identifiable by its tower that is visible from most of the city, has been turned into an amusement and water park

* There’s a Middle East Union and Israelis can travel to any country just by showing their Israeli ID card

* Passengers on an Israeli train ride past the pyramids

* Israeli and Iran judo competitors hug (at present, Iran refuses to compete against Israelis)

* Hiking by a Syrian archaeological site, now that the well known “Israel Trail” has become the “Levant Trail.” The orange, blue, white stripes are already found throughout Israel on the trail that runs from Eilat to the very north, and now, in Bloch’s vision, it extends into other countries, too.

* Israel makes it into the Soccer World Cup

* Israel in the World cup

* Taylor Swift concert in Israel

Kind of hard to believe. Obviously. But if in the summer of 2023, someone had imagined out loud what happened on October 7, that, too, would have seemed surrealistic. So who knows?

Better to dream than to dread. And thanks to Bloch’s song and video, Israelis are doing a bit more of that.

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We’ll come back to the video above, which is a clip share by Amit Segal, a highly regarded Israel journalist. Segal shared it on his X feed — it’s a clip of his comments on Israeli TV on Sunday, the day that the first three hostages of this deal were freed.

But first, a haunting drawing.

A day or two after the hostages returned home, this image by Moshe Shapira, the father of Aner Shapira, z’l, started appearing everywhere on my social media feed.

If you don’t recall the details of Aner’s bravery in throwing grenades back at the terrorists at the Nova until he was finally killed trying to defend those in the shelter with him, you can review the extraordinary story here.

Moshe Shapira sent this drawing out after he saw Emily Damari, below, return from Hamas captivity:

It takes a certain kind of soul to see the photo of Emily Damari below, and to think of the priestly blessing. The priest’s fingers are supposed to be spread in a certain way (see Wikipedia image below) when reciting the blessing. When Shapira saw this photo of Emily, that’s apparently what came to mind for him … so he drew the extraordinary image above, with the words יברכך ה' וישמרך, “May the Lord bless you and keep you,” the opening words of the blessing.

I suspect that many of us will have this image in mind during the priestly blessing for many years to come.

Amit Segal, a well known Israeli journalist who is a regular on Channel 12, was, I thought, excellent on Sunday afternoon as we watched the hostages come home. He was no less euphoric to see them alive and home than was anyone else, but he was deeply concerned.

As you hear above, he reminds his listeners that staying alive in this region depends not on being moral (alone), but on having people understand that “it doesn’t pay to mess with the Jews.”

Segal was clear — he was overjoyed that the hostages were alive and home, but he is deeply, deeply concerned about the precedent that Israel is setting, once again, in paying such a high price for hostages.

It’s not that one side is right and one is wrong, he reminds his listeners. It’s just that those “in favor” have not, he believes, spent sufficient time thinking about the cost and what it portends.

We share the clip that he posted (we’ve added the subtitles — he speaks very quickly so it’s a lot to stuff in to very brief seconds) to share this balanced view which, I think, ought to reflect more of the Israeli and Diaspora discourse about this trade, those that came before, and tragically, those that may well follow in the future.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

We posted the audio of the conversation shortly after it went live, but in response to those have requested it, are posting the video as well, split into two segments, because the full video conversation is long.

We’re grateful to 18Forty for their having granted us permission to do this.

We posted the first half of the video on Tuesday, and today, present the second half.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Sruli Fruchter is a rabbinical student, writer, activist, speaker & creative living in Jerusalem, Israel.

While pursuing semikha (rabbinical ordination) at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, Sruli is the director of operations at 18Forty — a Jewish media company exploring Jewish thought and ideas in a modern age — and is also a contributing columnist at the Forward.

Sruli studied International & Global Affairs at Yeshiva University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and received awards for Service to the Jewish People and Excellence in Bible Studies. In May 2022, Sruli delivered a TEDxYeshiva University talk on making work meaningful. Sruli was the 100th editor in chief of The Commentator, Yeshiva's independent student newspaper, and was a finalist for the Religion News Association's Religion Reporting Excellence.

We posted the audio of the conversation shortly after it went live, but in response to those have requested it, are posting the video as well, split into two segments, because the full video conversation is long.

We’re grateful to 18Forty for their having granted us permission to do this.

We will post the second half of the video on Thursday,

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Sruli Fruchter is a rabbinical student, writer, activist, speaker & creative living in Jerusalem, Israel.

While pursuing semikha (rabbinical ordination) at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, Sruli is the director of operations at 18Forty — a Jewish media company exploring Jewish thought and ideas in a modern age — and is also a contributing columnist at the Forward.

Sruli studied International & Global Affairs at Yeshiva University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and received awards for Service to the Jewish People and Excellence in Bible Studies. In May 2022, Sruli delivered a TEDxYeshiva University talk on making work meaningful. Sruli was the 100th editor in chief of The Commentator, Yeshiva's independent student newspaper, and was a finalist for the Religion News Association's Religion Reporting Excellence.

Interestingly, none of the children killed had Israeli citizenship. Israel has allowed the Druze in the north to decide whether they want citizenship, and for a variety of reasons—prime among them the fear that their area might be returned to Syria and that Assad would then punish them for having accepted Israeli citizenship—about 75% of the Druze in then north have declined citizenship.

One of the wounded children, Alahn, went through several surgeries and then rehabilitation at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, and was recently released. The hospital posted a Facebook video of his departure from the department, which has gone somewhat viral on Israeli social media.

The song that everyone is singing is the very popular “[God] Always Loves Me” performed here by Sasson Shaulov.

The part of the song that’s being sung is this:

וה' יתברך תמיד אוהב אותיותמיד יהיה לי רק טובה' יתברך תמיד אוהב אותי ותמיד יהיה לי רק טובויהיה לי עוד יותר טובועוד יותר טובועוד יותר טובועוד יותר טובועוד יותר טובועוד יותר טובותמיד יהיה לי רק טוב

And the blessed Lord always loves meAnd I will always have only goodThe blessed Lord always loves me and I will always have only goodAnd it will be even better for meAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd I will always have only good

Importing overtly religious themes into a song like this a distinctly Mizrachi contribution to Israeli music. The Mizrachi roots of the song are clear not only in the song but in the video that was produced for the song:

This “tribal” blend of religion, popular culture and faith as a given is much of “new Israel.”

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Here’s an AI-generated translation of the full song. Make sure to note the mosaic of Israeli images and people that were clearly carefully chosen. They say a tremendous amount about Israel — culturally, socially and politically.

God is a good father and He always takes pride in me, sees only the good points in meHe sees that I want to be good, it just doesn't work out, and I'm only missing a few prayersAnd God also saw the desire I had, that I tried, I didn't give upHe sees in my shame, in the bitterness I felt, how I started again each timeAnd the blessed Lord always loves meAnd I will always have only good

The blessed Lord always loves me and I will always have only goodAnd it will be even better for meAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd I will always have only good

He hears, has mercy on me, and always answers meAnd if not yet, He continues to waitFill me with the fact that You always love meGive me new gifts every dayAnd lead me with such mercy as in this world is called mercyLet everyone see that You do hear prayersAnd we'll smile, be healthy, and singThat the blessed Lord always loves meAnd I will always have only goodThe blessed Lord always loves me and I will always have only goodAnd it will be even better for meAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd I will always have only good

And I will have livelihoodI will have wealthAnd singles will have their matchThere will also be complete healing and strong healthBeautiful, happy lives year after yearThe light will shine in us, faith will illuminate,True wisdom and knowledge and understandingOur Messiah will come already and without any warWe'll also eat watermelon, it will be a holiday for us

The blessed Lord always loves meAnd I will always have only goodThe blessed Lord always loves me and I will always have only goodAnd it will be even better for meAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd even betterAnd I will always have only good

Now, watch the video at the very top once again, and watch the newly healed Druze boy about to go home back to the north of Israel singing about God (and imitating the music video) with the Jewish and Arab hospital staff —

— hard not to feel more than a bit of hope.

I thought that some of their questions were very important and interesting, so today we’re sharing portions of the Q&A session that followed.

The link above will take you to a brief excerpt of this portion of the conversation. For the full recording, please click the audio button embedded below.

There is also a full machine-generated transcript for those who prefer to read.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Now, we will move onto the Q&A portion. Please, go ahead.

The question is Iran. Is Iran the next target on Israel's side? Again, I don't know. I'm not involved.

And thank God, some Israelis, some places can still keep some secrets. A secret in this country is you only tell a few people. It's a crazy country in that regard. But militarily, at least, look, the Trojan horse thing, I mean, probably hundreds of people knew about it for years, and it didn't leak out. It's pretty unbelievable. You saw about these Israeli commandos that were in Syria and destroyed this factory. A hundred commandos went in, and they were apparently training forever. Look, there are certain things. You don't know if we can do it. I don't know if we can do it. What I can tell you is that there is an overwhelming sentiment in Israel that this is all about Iran, that if there's no Iran, there's no Hezbollah. If there's no Iran, there's much less Hamas. If there's no Iran, at least for a long time, there was no Houthis. Now, they're pretty independent of Iran for a while, so we have a problem. But the targets that Israel has been targeting in Yemen are meant to cut off the supply chain from Iran to Yemen. That's why if you've been attacking the airport and the ports, it's not because millions of tourists are dying to go to Sana’a to see what Yemen has to offer.

I mean, they might be, but I don't know any of them. It's really much more about Iran resupplying Yemen. Everybody understands here that the key to all of this is Iran, that the Iranian attitude to Israel is a theological attitude. It's an eschatological, theological attitude that nothing to do with Israel gives up this territory and then they get happy again. Overwhelmingly, I think the sentiment of Israelis is that if this conflict ends and Iran is as stable as it is now, we failed. Because you hear that from people on the right, people on the middle, and even some people on the left, because this is not really a right. There's no right and left very often in Israel. There's no left here protesting against what's going on in Gaza. I mean, a few individual people, but there's no anti-war movement. I spoke to a journalist, I don't know, months ago. She was from somewhere in Europe, and she said to me, I'm trying to find all these people who were leading the protest movement so I can find out what they think about it, but I can't find them. I said, They're in tanks.

It wasn't like protesting Vietnam where you took flowers and stuck them in the guns of the National Guard and paraded around campus. It's a whole different ballgame. I think there's a widespread sentiment in Israel that this has to be stopped. There was some I thought maybe it'll happen before January 20th, so Biden will leave that legacy, and Bibi and Biden can get it done before Trump is President, so he can start with a clean slate. Look, it's only the 3rd of Januaruy. I don't know what's being planned, but I think there's certainly a sentiment that if the 20th comes around and Iran is still in the situation it is, then the Trump administration, that's the hope, the widespread hope, is that the Trump administration will enable Israel to fundamentally make a very big change.

As a follow-up, what is the role of the Saudis, if any? Well, first of all, your question is about the Saudis and the Abraham Accords and so forth. By the way, it's important to say that the UAE and Bahrain have not been criticizing Israel.

I mean, they have populations there that are not supportive of Israel, to be sure. The way, for example, the King of Jordan is always criticizing Israel, even though he's scared the death of Palestinians because he's got a majority Palestinian and a Hashemite minority, which he is. He says what he has to say for the cameras because he understands that he's got to keep his Palestinian population mollified. That's, by the way, also our longest border. Our longest border is with Jordan. We have a very strong, vested interest in what happened in Syria not happening in Jordan. Don’t have to love the King of Jordan, but he keeps the border quiet, and that's all we want. The Abraham Accords was successful. They did not pull out of the accords. They did not do what many other Arab countries would have done. By the way, neither did Egypt become that critical. Egypt's actually played a mediating role for a long time in this conflict. Some of these peace deals or normalization agreements are much more successful than people might have imagined. Saudi Arabia has always been looming as the next major normalization thing. Don't forget that Saudi Arabia is deathly opposed to Iran getting a nuclear weapon because Saudi Arabia is Sunni and Iran is Shia, and they are not interested in Saudi Arabia getting weapon.

They would allow us, presumably, to use their airspace. I don't think that they would join the attack, but clearly, the Saudis have a vested interest in us doing this also. The negotiations that are going on, I'm sure, between the United States and Saudi Arabia and Israel. Saudi Arabia normalizes. They probably get weaponry in return. They get protected from Iran. It's way above my paygrade. But the assumption in Israel is that this is an opportunity to end this mortal enemy of the Jewish people, because don't forget, they attack Jews around the world. They attacked Jews in Buenos Aires years ago in that very event. This is not only about Israel. This is eschatological. It's about the Jews. Well, the whole point of this country is you do not get to kill Jews at random anymore because we're done with that. So I think that we're going to be helped by Saudi Arabia's views of this. But how it's going to play out, stay tuned for season 2, as they say, coming in a few months.

The next question is what role will Abbas play in the future of the Middle East?

Look, Mahmoud Abbas is a very sad story. He's a bona fide, old-fashioned anti-Semite who wrote his doctoral dissertation on how the Holocaust was basically a fabrication, who has argued that there was no temple on the Temple Mount. Now, some of it, of course, he says to please his crowds, but he has done absolutely nothing to try to move his people towards an understanding that you're never going to defeat us. I mean, that was never an issue. They can make things very miserable for us, but they can't defeat us. It's a failure. He's a failed president of a failed institution that's at the helm of what's largely a failed people for the last decades. That's sad.

It's sad for the Palestinians who could have been encouraged by a different leader to embrace a different future. It's tragic for us because we have guys who've died in the West Bank or Judea and Samaria in recent months, unfortunately, and because when we're not successful there, terrorism makes its way into our cities and so forth. Abbas is just a complete failure. There was an opportunity in 2005 for Gazans to embrace something different, and Hamas took control. I'm not blaming all Gazans for that. They did mostly elect Hamas, but they didn't necessarily elect Hamas to do what it ended up doing. Hamas had provided schooling, Hamas had provided food, Hamas had provided health care. So they were whatever. Hamas became something very, very different that I'm sure made many of them frightened and miserable. But what were they supposed to do? The Palestinian people need to decide that they want a different a leadership. Right now, a Palestinian leader who gets up one morning and talks about making peace with Israel or recognizing Israel's right to exist is typically a Palestinian leader who does not get up the next morning. And that's tragic more for them than for us.

And Abbas is old. I mean, he's in, I think, the 16th or 17th year of a five-year term. You got to do like Siri, remind me to leave office, thing, but he didn't do that. So I don't really think that Abbas is a major player here. The question really is who follows him? Is it Barghouti? Is it somebody else? Would Israel release from prison some of the people who are considered to be perhaps more moderate now? Are they really more moderate? Sinwar was in Israeli prison for a very long time and was saved from a brain tumor, which was not benign. He was saved by Israeli surgeons and so on and so forth. So I think who would replace Abbas is a very open question, and what role Israel would or would not play in making certain people possible is an open question. But the idea that Abbas somehow is a maker of any deal here, the people that I know, and they're much more expert than I am, see him as a pawn at this point.

Moving on to the next question, regarding American feelings of involvement in foreign wars such as in Ukraine and Israel when there are large problems at home.

Right. The question of Ukraine and people growing weary of Ukraine. Israelis have watched the Ukrainian conflict very closely for that exact reason. We don't really have a dog in the race between Russia and the Ukraine. And by the way, I mean, one of the things that makes it crazy for Israelis is that the Ukrainians are vicious anti-Semites, vicious anti-Semites. And many of us who live here have grandparents who left Europe because they were pursued by Ukrainians or were killed by Ukrainians. The Ukrainian story with Jews is a horrible, bloody story. They were enthusiastic participants in the slaughter during the Second World War. So Israelis have put that aside because we also, many of us, instinctively don't want Russia taking over other countries nearby. But I just want to point out that that's also another publication here that Ukrainian history with Jews is not a pretty one. Just look it up. But here's what I would say about it. We watched what happened with Ukraine, and we watched what happened in the world, growing very tired of Ukraine, and we watched about American isolationism when it came to Ukraine, and growing and growing with tremendous worry because we said, That's us next.

In other words, people saying, We don't want to keep pouring money in. It's taking away. Now look, America's inability to fight many of the things that it's facing, which are very real issues, whether it's the opioid crisis, or whether it's the homelessness crisis, or whether it's the borders, or whatever it is, they're all major issues. Every society has huge issues to deal with. None of those issues are not being addressed well because of America's foreign policy commitments. They're being addressed because nobody cares. If somebody came at the government who cared, you can make a dent. I know that you can’t stop the opioid crisis right away. It's so pervasive, and it's so horrifying, and it's so out of control. But you could probably begin to address it in ways that are not being done now. Same thing with the borders and so on and so forth. But I want to take this up not the 30,000 feet, but the 60,000 feet, and say this about America. The West has to start believing in itself again. Most of the people that I know who are my kids' age, my kids are all in their 30s. Most of my American friends' kids are not comfortable saying the Western way of life is a better way of life than Russia, China, Iran, whatever.

But it is. Let's see whether or not the West believes in itself well enough to, A, believe that it's right and better, and then, B, go fight for it. The idea that we were able to put some box americana in place post-World War II, and that 70, 80 years later, we should expect it just to be an autopilot thing, the world has never worked that way. I have to say, by the way, that I don't know how many young Americans would do what happened at Normandy. Now, they were cannon fodder. They were just cannon fodder, but they believed that the West had to survive. They got out of those boats and they climbed up the hills and they died, and the ones that came after them died a little bit higher up, and the ones that came after them died a little higher up than that until they got to the top, and then the world was saved. If America does not have a younger generation who would do the same thing at Normandy that it did back then, then the West is sunk. That's a function not of this president or that president. That's a function of American society's failure to inculcate in its young people a sense that we are actually better.

We are more moral, we're better for women, we're better for gays and lesbians, whatever your own personal view as that might happen to be. We're just better for individual rights and freedoms and so on and so forth. We should say that with great pride. But the West is on retreat. The joke in Israel is why do French tanks have forward gears? In case the enemy attacks from the rear. In other words, there's just this sense that nobody actually has the gumption to stand up and fight for what they believe in. This is really about the opening shots of really a world conflict, which might be fought economically, it might be fought territorially, it's going to be fought in skirmishes militarily here and there, and that could spread, or it could become a huge third world war. Who knows? We don't have any idea yet. But the question really is, do we have the... The first question I would say, the first answer to people that say, We're tired of all of this and so forth, is none of America's domestic problems are not getting addressed because America has foreign policy commitments. None. They can all be done at the same time.

America has got a fairly large budget. That's number one. Number two, when it comes to Israel, Ukraine, whatever, the first question is, do you believe in democracy? Do you believe in liberal democracy? Liberal, not meaning left wing, but liberal democracy in the Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian sense. Do you believe in it enough to actually put the resources of your country and the lives of your children on the line for that? If you don't, then forget it. It's just a matter of time until it goes over because the Russians will put those soldiers out there, and the Chinese will put those soldiers out there, and the Iranians will put those soldiers out there. If the West doesn't believe in itself well enough to fight, then the future of the West is fairly bleak. That's number two. Number three, here's a huge difference between us and the Ukrainians, and I'm not in any way disparaging the Ukrainians. These are not analogous forces. We are not arrayed against Russia. We're not fighting Russia. What I'm about to say is not meant to be a critique of the Ukrainians. It's just meant to be a comment about us. You poured a lot, a lot, a lot of money and a lot of arms into Ukraine, and they might lose.

You poured a lot, a lot, a lot of money and arms into us, and we are decisively winning. In other words, I'm not saying that our kids are braver than their kids or our kids believe in our country more than their... I'm not saying any of that. They're in an entirely different conflict. But you cannot argue that the money and material that was sent here was wasted. The idea was to enable Israel to, A, survive which it has, and maybe even to emerge from this much stronger. So whatever exhaustion people are feeling about Ukraine, which I totally understand, even though I also support the Ukrainians instinctively, I don't think the analogy that people make, well, we did this with Ukraine, and it's not working. Why should we do it with Israel? Because it is working. We are the canary in the coal mine here. I mean, we really are. If the world cannot understand that Israel as a democracy and as a Jewish state needs to be defended, then the world does not believe in the rights of any minorities anywhere, and the world does not believe that the ways of the West are better, more moral, more caring, more honoring of individual human beings, women, men, this, that, the other than anything else.

You don't want to be gay in China, and you don't want to be gay in Russia, and you don't want to be a dissident in China, and you don't want to be a dissident in Russia. While I hate a lot of the stuff that's getting said in American college campuses, I'm very proud to be from a country that allows them to say it. Now, I wish they didn't say it where they did. I think the university president should have clamped down on tense and all that much before. But that they have a right to say it, I think, is a sacred right. Do you want to live in a world in which you have the right to say what you think? You do. If you have a religious faith that leads you to believe in certain things, you don't want Russians ruling your life because they don't buy that. You don't want Chinese running the world because they don't buy that. You don't want Iranians running the world because they do believe in religion, but not in your religion. In other words, the liberal democracies that make up the West are, I think, an anchor We're on a basis in a foundation, I believe, of a world that's worth living in.

The question that Americans have to ask themselves, this is not Trump versus Biden or Trump versus Harris or anything of the sort. This is about the future of America. Do we believe in the values that founded this country, this country meaning America for a second, enough to say that we believe in it, to say that we think that it's better to raise our children, to be willing to sacrifice for it, and so on and so forth. We are the proof, and I'll just end with this. I think that we, Israelis, understand now that we are the proof that you can raise generations of people in a liberal democracy, many of whom are not at all religious, but who understand the gifts that their country represents for their people, their ethnicity, their history, whatever, to the point that they will throw themselves into the line of fire. I think the number, as of yesterday, there was 890 something soldiers, I think, have been killed. The number of wounded is, I think, 18,000. The number of widows in their 20s with children, because people in the religious communities tend to get married a little bit younger here.

The number of widows in their 20s with children here is an I don't know what the exact number is, is an unthinkable number. 40 something kids lost both parents in the attacks of October 7th. I mean, this is a bruised, hurting, bleeding, limping society, and it's going to be that for as long as most of the people who are alive now, especially the 20s and 30-year-olds, they're going to carry this with them. This is a dark, horrifying period that we've gotten a little bit used to, but we should not allow ourselves to forget how dark and how horrifying it was, and in many respects, still is. Even after all the guns are quieted, those widows are still going to be widows, and those orphans are still going to be orphans, and the people with no legs are still going to be people with no legs. And the people with PTSD who number in the thousands and thousands and thousands are going to have lives that are going to be very curtailed for as far as the eye can see. And yet, despite all of that, we are the proof that you can raise a generation of people which is now no longer remembers the generation of the founders.

In that regard, we're very much like the United States. We have a few people around in '48, but very few, relatively speaking. You can raise a generation of people who believe that this way of life is worth defending, who believe that their people is worth defending, who believe that if you're not willing to sacrifice your life at the end of the day, then you don't believe in it enough. I think the question that America should ask itself, and with this, I'll stop, is as it raises its younger generation, ask themselves, what do you actually believe in enough to give your life for? I don't mean your spouse or your kids. Forget that. Something that's beyond you and your immediate family. What do you believe in as a value enough that you would not happily die for it, but you would willingly die for it? If the answer of that is nothing, then the educational system at the core of what is still, I think, the greatest country on Earth is a deeply flawed, stumbling education system, and no less important than the opioid issue, and no less important than the border issue, and no less important than the homeless issue, and no less important than poverty, and no less important health care are no less important than any of the other huge issues that America has is to figure out a way to raise future generations of Americans who believe in themselves and in their country to the same extent, to the same degree, with the same passion that we have now discovered that we've been able to raise generations of Israelis who believe in and love this country.

I'm really delighted that you're here. Really honored that you made the trip. Very, very privileged to spend some time with you. I'm grateful. I am going to sprint home because as I mentioned, my partner in this particular relationship is not a negotiator, and candle lighting is relatively soon. We had grandchildren over before I left, so the house probably looks a little bit like the site of a terrorist incident. We got to get it all cleaned up before Shabbat and get candles lit and get dressed and go to school. Thank you once again. Have a safe trip home. Thank you for being here. Thanks for who you are. I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you. Thank you.

Gilad Kariv is currently a member of the Knesset for the Democrats and previously for the Labor Party, in the 25th Knesset. He gave a speech at the Knesset during Hanukkah which, I think, ought to be heard and admired by everyone who cares about Israel’s moral fiber.

Before we get to MK Kariv, though, a correction and an apology.

Last week, I shared a humorous clip about the Houthis and their missile attacks on Israel, put out by the Israeli singer Eyal Golan. I noted, though only parenthetically, that Golan had been accused of sexual relationships with underage women, but I also noted that the charges had been dropped.

Very coincidentally, perhaps because that clip brought him very much into the center of attention again, the Israeli press exploded with coverage about Golan last week, and it became clear to me that the accusations are much more serious than I had understood.

Since then, the press has been relentless in its accusations. Here, from Maariv, for example:

“Eyal Golan should be vomited out of Israel society: Back to the performance which revealed his true character.” Followed by: “A healthy society would have vomited him out of its midst. Instead, he fills stadiums, and people raise questions about the young women involved.”

The situation with him is far more serious than I’d realized, and I’m very grateful to those readers who wrote, forcefully but also respectfully, to say that it was wrong to link to anything by him. I think they were right, and we’e deleted the post from the archive.

Back to the video clip above, from the Knesset TV channel, which made its way around Israeli social media last week. It’s a portion of a speech by MK Gilad Kariv, during Hanukkah, as the Knesset deliberated the budget.

This part of the speech, though, has nothing to do with the budget, and everything to do with Judaism, morality and the Jewish state. One can agree or disagree with Kariv’s political positions on a host of issues—personally, I agree with some, disagree with others. But I don’t think that anyone can deny that the power of his moral message is precisely the kind of discourse we need to hear from the podium at the Knesset.

If there’s anything tragic about his speech, it’s that I’m hard-pressed to think of a single right-leaning MK or someone from any of the religious parties who speaks with the same passion about Judaism and morality.

Imagine an Israel in which MK’s competed to see who could most convincingly correlate their political positions to the best of Judaism’s moral tradition ….

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

MK Gilad Kariv was born and educated in Tel Aviv. His involvement with the Reform Movement began in high school, when he joined the Beit Daniel Synagogue in Tel Aviv, which, incidentally, is also the religious home of MK and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

Kariv served in the Israel Defense Forces Intelligence Corps under the Haman Talpiot program. Following five years of service, during which he completed the officers program with honors, Kariv studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2001, he earned a bachelor's degree in law and Jewish studies. In 2001–2002 he interned in the Supreme Court of the State Attorney Office. In 2003, he received a master's degree in Jewish studies at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. In 2004, he was certified as a lawyer by the Israel Bar Association. In 2008, Kariv received a master's degree in constitutional law from Northwestern University in Chicago, through a combined program with Tel Aviv University.

In 2003, Kariv received rabbinic ordination at the HUC. Among his posts, Kariv served as a rabbi at Congregation Beit Daniel in Tel Aviv until 2008. Between 2003–2009, Kariv served as the director of the Israel Religious Action Center, and headed Reform movement public and legal initiatives in Israel on issues of freedom of religion, relation between religion and state, conversion, and numerous other social causes.

There are photos that shouldn’t exist. Period. This one is of the entrance to our shul, a small community, with the names of the two young men it has lost in this war. Hersh Goldberg-Polin z”l on the right, and the sign regarding Yuval Shoham’s z”l funeral and shiva on the left.

But this is Hanukkah, and we deserve some miracles, too. If there’s a central question that Hanukkah is about (and there are several, actually), it is:

“Why are all the peoples who sought to destroy us now gone, while we are still here?”

The answer to that question is complex. But the stories of Israelis like Roee Azizi are, without question, a central part of it.

Here’s his.

Zionist leaders have always understood that one of the many factors that would shape the future of the Jewish state was who was willing to live on the borders. David Ben-Gurion, in a move that made sense for the state but that was suffused with racism and a worse than disparaging attitude to immigrants from North Africa, Iraq and Iran, sent many thousands of immigrants to encampments (ma’abarot) that today are cities, most of them still poor: Kiryat Malakhi. Sderot. Dimona. Many more.

Ben-Gurion famously said that it was “in the Negev that the Israeli people will be tested,” meaning that their future would depend on whether enough Israelis would have the fortitude and commitment to move to a place that was barely habitable, simply because it was what the country needed.

When he left politics, Ben-Gurion did just that. He picked up and moved to Sde Boker, where he is buried today, his grave and that of his wife overlooking the desert he so deeply believed in.

That was then, but what about now?

What about the south—the Gaza envelope—which was largely destroyed in the worst catastrophe this country has ever seen? What about the north, from which some 75,000-100,000 have been moved, in which Metula has been essentially destroyed, where Kiryat Shemonah is a ghost town, and hundreds of homes, businesses and parks have been burned beyond repair by Hezbollah weapons?

In what kind of a world would anyone who is not from there even think about moving there? Roee Azizi is making sure that that’s exactly what happens. As we hear in our conversation, after October 7, Roee decided that he needed to do something that mattered. And since then, he put the rest of his life on hold and has gotten hundreds of people who’d never lived there to move to the south. Now he’s planning on getting thousands to go to the north.

Lighting candles in the darkness is one way of bringing light to this world. Roee Azizi’s commitment is another.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript, prepared specially for our paid subscribers, for those who prefer to read.

We're meeting with someone today who I'm really very grateful for taking the time to come to Jerusalem and to have this conversation. And I'm also very grateful on a personal level because we need good news and we need to be inspired. And we're getting good news in the north. It's quieting down, and we're getting some good news in the northeast because things are shifting there, and that may be very good for Israel. And militarily, things are starting to go to go better. But the Jewish people in a state of shock in Israel and outside of Israel. It's been a very, very rough haul for 14 months for Jews all over the world. And I'm sitting with someone today who I think really brings back to my mind, at least, classic, wondrous Zionist inspiration. I'm sitting with a young man in his late 20s, an Israeli, Roee Azizi, who will tell us more about himself in just a minute. He is involved in many many projects. We're going to talk about one of them today called Hinenu, which if it sounds to you a little bit like Hineni, you're onto something, and we'll come back to that in a minute.

I think you're going to leave this conversation, perhaps, if you're my age, wishing you were 30 years younger, so you could participate in what he and his colleagues are building. And either way, even if you're not young enough to do what he's doing, just to be very grateful and inspired for what this younger generation of Israelis feels, does, believes in, and so forth. So, Roee, first First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to be here. Let's just start by tell us about you. Who is Roee Azizi? Tell us how you grew up, where you grew up, what family, military, all that stuff.

First of all, it's a pleasure. If that intro wasn't recorded, I would not believe that I have been introduced in this way. So thank you. Roee, I'm 28. I grew up in Hod Hasharon, in the center of Israel.

Not far from Tel Aviv-ish. Yeah.

But I grew up to a traditional family, Masorati family. Two parents, both of them were originally from Iran.

But they didn't know each other in Iran, did they?

They didn't. My mom actually grew up in Teheran until she was 17.

And she came back in the '50s?

She made Aliyah in '72.

Oh, right before the Revolution?

Right before the Revolution. A few years before the Revolution.

The Revolution is '79. Exactly. So they came a few years before. True. Okay, so she was a teenager.

She decided at 17 to come here with her nine siblings and her parents.

Wow.

They grew up there in the poorest and worst situation I can imagine. Actually, she didn't even tell me those stories of her growing up because she didn't want me to suffer hearing those stories. But that was the reality of the family. Growing up, 11 people in one bedroom, basically. So they made it here. And yeah, so I'm the son of my mom and my dad.

And your dad came when?

He was born in Israel.

Okay, but his parents came from Teheran. And they came when?

They came, I think, the late '40s.

Oh, so part of that whole massive Aliyah, when Israel was trying to bring people in. Okay, so I'm assuming you're not one of eleven children. I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess here.

You're right. It's me and my brother.

Okay. That's a quite a change for your mother to be one of 11 siblings or 12 siblings, and then they'd have two kids.

Exactly. Yeah.

Okay. You grew up in Hod Hasharon.

I grew up in Hod Hasharon, and I had a normal life as a kid. When I was 18, I got recruited to be a parachuting instructor. And afterwards, I served also as a planning officer in the parachuting school.

How long were you in?

For three years.

You did the full three?

Yeah. After three years, I actually flew to America for my first time to be a shaliach (emissary) in Ramah Wisconsin. So that was a unique experience. Actually, it was the first time I experienced the Jewish diaspora, which was amazing for me as a Jewish person to be exposed to this amazing, diverse community or communities. So it was an incredible experience. Actually, I went twice. So I went back in 2019. And then I moved to Jerusalem to study in the Hebrew University, Political Science and International Relations. And really, I fell in love with Jerusalem. I felt like it's my first home. It was closer to the identity or the character of my family than the place I grew up in.

That's very interesting.

Yeah. The colors of Jerusalem, the tradition, the warmth of the people. So I fell in love with the city, and immediately it came into play as I turned out to be a social activist in Jerusalem. I must say that the reality in those days, 2019, COVID, and also the political atmosphere in Israel created a lot of opportunities to be able to be involved. So I found myself just basically dedicating my daily life to Jerusalem, to social action here, to volunteering in the market, in the shuk, or in other different projects. I was also a part of Stand With Us alumni program, and everything was in parallel to studying in the Hebrew U. After a few years-

Where did that come from? Where does a young social... I mean, Hebrew U is a very serious university. There's a lot of work. Hebrew University students take a ton of courses at the same time. It's not like the American model. You take four or five courses, and that's a full load. Here, it's twice that, maybe. Where does this drive to become a social activist come from? Because it's really connected to the story that we're going to talk about in a minute about Hinenu. I'm just curious because there are so many of you, obviously, and it's part of the DNA of Israeli society. Were your parents social activists? Did they tell you you should be social activists? Did you have in a youth movement? When you get into bed at the end of the day and you ask yourself, How did I become a social activist? What answer do you give yourself?

First of all, I still try not to describe myself as a social activist.

You just did, though. I didn't make it up. You said it.

No, you're right. It's my mistake. But people seek meaning. And young adults in Israel, especially after the army service, they ask themselves, again, in my view, how can I live a life of meaning? How can I live the life I was given? And what can I do in light of this huge mission of what I believe is the Israeli society is experiencing, not only after October 7th, which we'll go longer and describe, but also before October 7th? I mean, it's hard to remember, but we had a few years of political clashes, of social divides. We had a lot of problems, and most of them we're still experiencing. So I think that after I When I finished my army service, I asked myself, Okay, you're 21, and you're looking ahead 5, 10, 20 years ahead, and you're asking yourself, What can you do in order to be a contributor to your society? And what can you do in order to be another part of the bigger mission that we're facing as a society and as a people in general. Let's call it the, whatever, the amorphic or the spiritual side of it. The more practical side of it is me meeting role models, people who are amazing and really shaped me.

I think I've been blessed in the last 10 years, at least, to be surrounded by people who are incredible and really give me the inspiration myself to try to be active.

So you graduate, you finish Hebrew U, you're living in Jerusalem, you're a social activist. Then there's COVID, so everybody shuts down. And then there's the judicial reform period period, which is a very tumultuous period in Israeli society, which brings us, we'll skip a few things, to 2023. On October 6th, 2023, if we had had a conversation, I'd say to you, what are you up to in life on October 6th? What's the answer?

I'm running the Jerusalem Model, which is a community of civic society leaders, approximately 200 of them, very diverse, by the way, Jewish and non-Jewish all across Jerusalem, with the vision of creating a a civic society in the city that really creates hope and creates a model for a Jerusalem diverse society that's both diverse and prosperous. So that's professionally. Personally, I probably would have told you that in the last few years, I felt personally, but obviously talking nationally about the situation, that the much the situation gets worse and more dangerous, the more I feel committed to be involved in doing good.

There's a phrase in America, I think it may be an army phrase, I'm not quite sure, but it says, When the going gets tough, the tough get going. I don't know exactly where that phrase comes from. But you're saying the more you saw the nature of the trauma or the desperate need for something in Israel, the more you became committed to doing stuff. So you're running this Jerusalem Model.

So I'm running the Jerusalem Model. And I'm afraid of the situation in Israel.

What are you worried about? October 6th, I find you somewhere before Shabbat on a Friday, and I said to you, We have a cup of coffee on a Friday morning, and you tell me you're worried about the future of Israel? What are you worried about?

First of all, I'm worried about the near future. I'm worried because of two things. First of all, the gap or dissonance between the corruption of the politicians and the way that they're disconnected from the people. That's one thing. Obviously, the second thing is they divide between themselves, the politicians. Eventually, they run our life here. That's one thing. The next thing which worries me even more, is the fact that people in my generation, on October 6th, at least, 2023, they say, Okay, I've been living my life here the past 20, 25, 30 years, and I feel like I'm living in a continual crisis. Also, it's a multi-system crisis because it's really hard to live here in a lot of ways. It's really expensive to live here. In a lot of ways, it's a bit dangerous to live here. I mean, the security situation is unclear also up until October 6th. Socially, the divide is getting worse. Again, politically, I'm looking at my generation and I'm I'm saying people will, chas v'chalila (God forbid), say, Okay, I'm rid of it. I'm done. I'm done. I'll pack my things, I'll move to Thailand, or I move to the US, or people will say, I'm done and I'm going to stay here, but I'm probably going I'm not going to be focused on my personal lives.

I'm going to build my startup, and I'll live in Tel Aviv, and I'll drive my nice car, and the country will do whatever the country does.

It doesn't mean that people will not be willing to contribute to the state. People will still pay taxes. If they build a startup, it's great for the local economy. But mentally or consciously, people will say, I'm done. I can't keep resisting the national crisis that's been tearing us apart. And that was the hardest thing for me to imagine, that the young generation that's supposed to be the future of the state or the society is really losing hope and feeling this frustration and depression or desperation of the situation.

Friday, October 6th, let's say you and I, right now, I'm half a kilometer from here in Baka. We go to one of those nice cafés. I don't want to talk about your generation. I want to talk about you for a second. On October 6th in the morning on a Friday, it's during the chagim period. It's right before Simchat Torah. I say to you, How optimistic are you about this country? What would you have said to me on October 6th?

Very optimistic. And I'll try to phrase it actually in realistic terms. During the three, four years where we had the ongoing elections- Every six months. Every six months. My friends who work in high tech, and they're not really in the whatever, political or public conscience, or they're not really aware of the situation. They used to tell me, Roee, what's going on? What's your perspective? They used to come to me like, I'm a shaliach, or whatever. But what do you think is going to happen? I told them, Listen, I think in the near future, Also, looking at it as if life is made up of this pendulum swing. In the near future, the politicians keep dragging us to this extreme point on the pendulum swing. And I think that my generation, me personally, but we as a generation, because of the fact that we grow up during those 10, 15 years in that atmosphere, we will eventually say, we're tired of it. We're not able to carry it anymore. And we will be the generation that uses that energy in order to try to shift the pendulum into a more balanced way. So in the near future, I'm worried.

To be more honest, before October 7th and after the famous Yariv Levin-Judicial reform stuff. Judicial reform stuff. I knew that danger is coming. I knew that something will break because physically, being in that extreme point is unsustainable. Reality can't continue going that extreme point. I knew that something was going to happen. Unfortunately, the worst has happened. That's me on October 7th, 2023.

October 6th. Okay, then October 7th happens. 7th, 8th, 9th. Everything What happens? What happens to you?

On Shabbat, I'm with friends up north, actually, and we're without signal in our phones. We have no idea what's going on on Shabbat morning. On It's only around 10:00 or 11:00 AM, we're going out to an area with signal and we realize what's going on. Immediately, we drive down south. All of us serve as reserves. My friends go to their army bases. I go down south near the Otef, actually, near the Gaza envelope in Be'er Sheva, in Pikud Darom.

The Southern Command. Yeah.

I arrived in my base already at 2:00 PM or 3:00 PM. So we rushed all the way there. And I come there and I realize what's going on. And by the way, I don't serve, again, in the parachuting school. I serve in a more classified role in Modiin, in the intelligence unit. And I realized that we're experiencing an historical event, historical strategy, that I think we will never be able to understand the size of it. I remember were feeling or experiencing that feeling of historical times. And it took me a few days to realize that that crisis also when there is opportunity. And I remember myself thinking at night that I personally feel an inner calling that because of the level or the magnitude of the disaster, me personally, I have to be involved in any way in creating the opportunity that waits in the day after. I remember it was basically the first or second week after October 7th. I remember texting to friends like, Listen, I don't know when, but on the first stop or vacation that I will have from Miluim, from the reserves, I will pack my stuff from Jerusalem, leave my job, leave my friends, leave everything him behind and move to living in the Gaza envelope. And only in retrospect, and I'll obviously will elaborate, but only in retrospect, I understood that it was an inner calling that relied or sat in this value of solidarity and achva, the feeling of pain due to what people experienced in the Otef, and the feeling of dedication to come to a part of it. Those were the first weeks of October.

So this is in your blood. I mean, what becomes eventually Hinenu, and you'll talk about it in a second. So what becomes eventually Hinenu is already in your head. I mean, almost immediately. It's just the instinct that you have. And the idea is to move down to the Otef, reminding everybody that Otef means the Gaza envelope. So the Otef is where all the people seem that we're attacked are. It's all the way along the border. And to move there. You're going to move there. What do you say to yourself? I'm going to move there because why? Hizdahut, identification with these people or people are killed, so they need more bodies. If somebody had said to you, you tell your mom, I'm going to go down and move to the Otef. And let's say she's not going to raise issues of safety, security. She trusts you on that. But she would say to you, Why? Like kol hakavod, I'm all for it. I'll bake you cakes. I'll bring you cakes. It's all good. But why do you want to do it? What are you hoping to accomplish? What would you have said?

I must say that I knew that it's a duty, that it's not, let's call it a security duty or whatever. I didn't feel like if I'll make it there, I will be an engine immediately. But I knew that I have to be this pioneer who proves that it's not only possible, but it's necessary to do that step. I feel like I knew that it's a social mission. It's a social Zionist call or inner calling to come and just be a part without any rash and tziltzulim.

Without any making a big trararama about it. I don't know to say rash and tziltzulim, but that's the idea.

Yeah, without any public call, just to come myself yourself and do it.

When was the first time that you began to speak to friends about doing this?

The first week after October 7th.

So you already had the head in your head, and then you said to your friends, Come be meshuga with me.

Before, I said, Listen, I don't know why, but I feel this inner feeling that tells me that as soon as I'll have this break from the reserves, I will pack my stuff in Jerusalem and just move. In that uncertainty, without knowing why. As you mentioned, it's just probably a Zionist instinct.

Oh, that's a big deal.

Yeah. I did it in December last year, December 2023, when the western Negev is still obviously at war and the area is evacuated. The kibbutzim, Sderot, Ofakim, most of the people are not there. I made it to Sderot, packing my stuff in Jerusalem, leaving my job, telling my boss that I have to leave, that that's the call that I feel. I moved to Sderot, and I made it to a city that's been obviously neglected- for a long time. .

We'll just give people a little bit of background because people don't really know. Sderot started out as what's called the ma'abara. It had ma'abarot. The ma'abarot, Ben Gurion actually created the ma'abarot. There's a lot of movies that were made, or Ephraim Kishon made movies about this. Anyway, there were all of these ma'abarot. They were basically They were shacks made out of metal, mostly. And that's where they put all the thousands and thousands and thousands of immigrants who came to Israel, mostly from North Africa and Iraq and Iran and Yemen. And they put them in these little places which were situated for security reasons all along the border. And they were horrible. The level of disease was horrible. Just to give you a little bit of historical background. They're made out of metal. So in the summer, it is just beastly unbearably hot. In the winter, they literally flood with mud. These are the places where, whether it's true or not, the claims are made that this is where children disappeared from, Yemenite children, quote, unquote, disappeared from these places. And some people argue that they were then given to Ashkenazi families who couldn't have children.

Yaacov Lozowic, who has been on our podcast and was once the chief archivist of Israel State Archives, did a tremendous amount of research about it and said, It's just not true. It didn't happen. Kids died because they were taken to the hospital and they died, and paperwork was terrible, and it's very possible that families didn't get their kid back. But he really believes that the story about people being taken away and given is not true. I hope it's not true. The ma'abarot eventually become just really poor cities. So you have they wrote, you have actually Talpiyot, which is about a five-minute walk from where you and I are sitting right now. I mean, now it's a bustling part of Jerusalem. But Talpiyot was a ma'abara. And there's all kinds of them all across the Negev. I just want people to understand when you say you go to Sderot, and Sderot has been neglected not only from Gaza, rockets since 2005, Sderot has been neglected since 1940, whatever it was when it was created. So that's a very long interruption, and I apologize for it. But I think it's just important for people to understand Sderot has been a horror show for a very, very long time. All right, so you moved to Sderot. There's nobody there, right? I mean, it's abandoned?

It's basically abandoned. It's evacuated.

Where did you go to sleep that night?

I had a sublet. I found a sublet, and I stayed there for a few weeks. And in those few weeks, I met people who were around, people who had farmers and people who were a part of the security forces around. And I tried to ask myself in parallel to meeting reading them in parallel to reading about the history of the western Negev, you mentioned Ben Gurion, and you mentioned, obviously, the situation of Sderot and the kibbutzim, and I've started to really connect the dots and really to understand that the reality that we've experienced before October 7th led to October 7th. There's a direct link, unfortunately.

Between what and what?

Between the reality that we experienced as a society before October Before October 7th, there's a direct link between that and-

You mean a division inside of Israel because of judicial reform.

Exactly.

Just to remind our listeners, in case people may have missed this episode, we interviewed Ari Shavit, who, as you know, is obviously one of Israel's leading journalists. And Ari wrote in print, he said, Keep this up and we are going to get attacked. Now, he thought it was going to be from Lebanon. And he told me he lives in Kfar Shmaryahu, and I interviewed him at his house. And he He said when the sirens went off that morning, and his wife said to him, What the hell is this? He said to her, It's the third Lebanon war. Now, he was wrong. It wasn't the third Lebanon war. It was something much different and bigger, and Lebanon eventually became part of it. But he, like you, he said, This can't go on. You can't have this division. Our enemies are looking at us. They see us divided. They see us split up. They see us weak. They're going to jump. He thought it would be Nasrallah, and then it was Hamas. Okay, so you had a sense that this was going to... We brought this on ourselves, indirectly. We brought this on ourselves.

I agree. To be honest, I'm nothing compared to Ari Shavit, but I remember-

That's not true, by the way, but okay.

I remember telling to friends that I'm sure that Netanyahu will start a war in order to shift the public atmosphere or the public, whatever, focus from the judicial form. I I was sure that he will start. Obviously, now, in retrospect, I'm sorry that he didn't. But anyway, so I meet people over there in western Negev after I've moved, and I'm starting to connect the dots, and I understand the direct link between the reality before and after. And I realized, again, that my generation is suffering from that long term crisis, multi-system crisis that puts a big question mark on our future here in Israel. But in that stage, I'm telling myself, of, all right, October 7th must serve as a tectonic event that really marks the historic Zionist mission of my generation, of us understanding that the reality that we experienced before October 7th is unsustainable, and we must take responsibility for the future, for the stability, for the prosperity of us as a society, even before thinking about the state, I mean, in terms of politically.

And then when I realized that, looking back 75 years back to the establishment of Israel, I realized that the Zionist mission was to really to form a state, to create a miklat, to create a secure place for the Jewish people. But I think that the attention to building a society wasn't there. And I think that my generation, we experienced, But also due to global effects and global trends that create divides in societies, we must understand that it's our mission, and it's our Zionist chapter in the history of our people to really come to be a in a way.

A model society. Exactly.

The practical, whatever, understanding of that spirit was that even though the situation is sensitive in the western Negev, and even though there's big uncertainty in the area, I must call my generation and basically try to leverage that inner calling into a public calling and say to youngsters across Israel, It's time to say Hineni. It's time to say Hineni personally, but Hinenu as a generation.

Hineni, here I am. That's what Abraham said when God called him. That's what Moses said when God called him. It's a word that appears in the Bible several times when somebody answers the call.

Exactly.

And so Hineni is the singular, Hinenu is the plural, and the name of the organization that you found it is Hinenu.

Exactly. And I realized that I must try to create a movement, and I tried to do it in a very modest way.

A movement that's going to do what?

Really encourage young adults from across Israel, religious, secular, from the right, from the left, to come and just be a part of the local communities in the rest of Negev.

In the Otef?

In the Otef.

And young adult means?

Means 24 to 35, let's say, approximately.

Okay.

Singles, couples, families.

How many did you hope would come down?

Wow. At the beginning, I remember posting on Facebook and LinkedIn I remember calling this, whatever, I gave it that topic, like young adults are moving to the rest of Negev. I called my vision and I said, It's our time to just try to leverage our inner feeling in into an action and come and live here. Just be a part of the communities. We didn't want to, chas v'chalila, replace the communities that were evacuated. We didn't want to come and build whatever a new society over there. We wanted to come and be a part in a very humble, modest way, and just come for the long term, not only to come for a few months to whatever, volunteer in agriculture or stuff. Just really come and be a part of the local communities. And the reason I understood that I should create this movement, that it's eventually become to a regional community of young adults in the western Negev, is because I also wanted to create this social project that really tells the rest of the society, Listen, there's hundreds of young adults who made it to live here. They're very diverse. They have their own background and political aspirations or thoughts, and they really decided to become a part of a community that works for a bigger goal and create bridges between people from different backgrounds.

And this is how the Israeli society can look like. It can look like a diverse Zionist community of people who are living a life of meaning and giving for a bigger thought or a bigger goal and really puts aside the divide or whatever.

Okay, so on January 30th, 2024, a month or two after you begin to do your Facebook thing, I bump into you in the street and I say, How's it going? How many people are you planning to get to come down there? What would you have said?

I was a bit realistic, unfortunately, and I said, Listen, let's imagine half a year from now in Rosh HaShana in October 2024, I hope that we'll have 30 who already moved, really for long term, decided to move.

And on Rosh HaShana 2024, how many had moved?

Approximately 70.

70? And as of today?

We have approximately 120. And they're only part of my movement. There are also other young adults who moved just independently.

And these people are living where? And what are they doing, and are they getting jobs in the local economies there? Are they working remotely and just living there? What's the story with these people? Yeah.

So all of the above, really. But again, people who are, let's say, between 23 to 35, singles, family, couples, couples, mostly singles and couples. Some of them work regionally, some of them work nationally, I mean, from afar. I think that most of them work in the, let's call it the social sector, whether it's in informal education or formal education, whether it's in the more medical professions. So people who are obviously needed in that region.

And are they having trouble finding jobs? Or they're getting jobs fairly easily?

So let's say one of the practical things that I've done in the last half a year or a year is not only to calling people to move and listen to my vision, but also to helping people with practical needs that I didn't have when I moved, which means trying to help people find jobs, apartments, and to build a community. So people, when they do that step, they won't be by themselves. So we managed to help people find some employment, and we managed to help people find an apartment, and they live in the kibbutzim, and they live in the moshavim. The Gaza envelope, the west of Negev, is a region that approximately in miles, let's say it's about 40 miles from north to south. In Israeli sizes, it's pretty much big. So people live all across the area. And now once we have 120 who already moved, we're really creating this regional community of young adults that's made up both of those newcomers and locals. You young adults who grew up there and ask themselves, should I stay to live here after October 7th? And I want to try to convince them to stay.

Because we're joining you.

Exactly. Be partners of the community that we're creating here. And maybe professionally or socially or from other motivations, it will give you the motivation to stay here and build your family here. And in that way, that community of Hinenu will be able to really contribute to the local, to the regional strength and resilience.

So you would originally hoped you'd get 30, and then by Rosh HaShana, you had 70. Now there's 120. And I want to talk about the north in a minute also, because you have your eyes on the north, where there's been tremendous devastation and destruction that people don't really understand. Metulah has been wiped out. Maybe Metulah doesn't exist, and Kiryat Shmonah is very badly banged up. We'll come back to the north in a second. If we meet a year from now, what are we in December? So we meet towards the end of 2025, realistically. Based on how it's going so far? What do you think it's going to look like? What do you hope it's going to look like?

Looking at the south, I hope that we will be able to shape even more the mechanism that we've created. And not only that we will have a prosperous community of young adults in the western Negev, we will also have that mechanism that really creates job opportunities in the western Negev, creates housing opportunities over there, obviously in collaboration with the regional councils and other actors. But I hope that we will be able to be a significant agent of hope in the region, where young adults who move there see it both as just an opportunity to live a happy life. Not only a life of spirituality or Zionist mission, but just living a good quality of life, but also, obviously, a life of meaning. So that's in the south. Looking up north-

Before you get to the north, I just want to point something you said, which I love. People of being agents of hope. We always talk about being agents of change. That's a common phrase. This idea of being agents of hope is really a beautiful idea. I mean, that's really a beautiful idea. I want to ask you one quick question about these people. How do they break down left, right, religious, secular, all that stuff?

Pretty much diverse. I would assume that most of them are either religious or used to be religious. So obviously grew up on-

Most of them were religious or used to be religious.

Yeah. I mean, I assume that most of them grew up on Zionist values. So they see that mission or they felt that inner calling. I would say, obviously, that most of them served as reserved. I'm sure that some of them also fought in Gaza.

So obviously felt physical connection to that area and wanted to fulfill that, whatever.

Yeah, to fulfill that mission also civically. So they're diverse, some religious, some secular, some masorati like me. So just in middle. But all of them are, in a way, have decided to dedicate their life or their future for this mission. And I must say also, the reason that I see them and us as agents of hope is because the major problem that I witnessed, experience, and see is this problem of desperation. When the future generation see no hope or see no positive, optimistic future to the state, then people either, again, decide to leave or to live and stay. People who feel desperation and decide to be a part of the Hinenu, they basically do it because they seek meaning and they seek society, they seek community.

They want to be a part of something that's bigger than them. We know it's based on Obviously, researchers, we know that it turns life into a happier life, so it's not surprising.

Which, of course, by the way, is a lot of what motivated the people who founded those kibbutzim to found those kibbutzim. Exactly. Ironically, It's the same thing. We're going to go to the north for a second in a minute. But I know that since you and I first met a couple of months ago and began talking about this, and you were teaching me about your project, you've had losses. You've had two, at least, partners who were part of this project who, unfortunately, aren't with us anymore. I think it says a tremendous amount about Israel. If you just say just their names and who they were and what happened to them, both in their memory, but also to give our listeners a reminder, though. I don't know, maybe you and I met two months ago, whatever. It wasn't that long ago. And already in that short time, in this very small movement, there has been lost. Can you just say just a couple of sentences about those two people? Yeah.

So again, it's part of our bigger movement of hundreds of young adults, we had people who served in the IDF as reserves and both as duty reserve. We had Eitan Oster, who fell in the battle entering into Lebanon as part of his unit, Egoz.

That was when eight people were killed, I think, right?

Exactly.

Right at the very, very beginning of the Lebanon.

Exactly.

So that was considered a huge disaster.

Eitan really saw himself as a shaliach of Zionism, as a modern shaliach of Zionism. Really, he was amazing. Together with him, we also had Yonatan Deutsch, who was really a promising young leader, promising young leader who saw our bigger movement, Tikvatenu, our hope. He saw that movement as really as a promising movement for Israel in general, a national promise. And he got murdered in a pigua.

In a terrorist attack.

In a terrorist attack.

Shortly after getting released from the army.

Exactly. Shortly after getting released from a special unit that he was a part of and after serving more than a year in Gaza. So yeah, a few days before that, he got murdered in the Bik'a.

In the Jordan River Valley.

Exactly. And they're just two parts of, I would say, thousands and thousands of young Israelis who have decided to to jump on October 7th and just see it as their life duty to save us as a society and as a people. And they really, they fulfilled that mission, and we lost so many of them. And in another interview that I've had, I said that I hope that in every abducted civilian that we've had, and And in every soldier that we've lost, and we've lost a lot of them, we will have one young adult who will decide to move either to the south or to the north and just be a part of this Zionist mission that we're trying to accomplish. Again, because it's a social mission. It's a mission that's made up of solidarity. I'm hoping that they see us from-

A quick word or two about the north, just so people understand what your plans are there, and then we'll conclude.

Yeah. So again, we're experiencing these historical times, what happens in Syria now and the ceasefire in Lebanon. And really, I'll say that I hope that the Israeli state and the Israeli politicians will be smart and great enough to even try to forge peace in Lebanon and Syria.

But in parallel, we still have the approximately 80,000 people who are evacuated from their homes in the north, and they're waiting to come back. And we, as Hinenu, we're looking up north. I actually drive tomorrow for a few days over there to meet the mayors over there and to try to really map out and learn the situation in the region. And I hope that if we will be needed, we will try to have a major movement of thousands of youngsters. Thousands? Thousands. I thought about hundreds in the beginning, but I spoke with some people who told me, Roee, you probably will need to bring thousands. Because unfortunately, there's a fear that thousands won't come back.

They're very clear that they're not going back, a lot of people.

Exactly. And again, we don't want to replace them, but we're in touch with the local communities over there. And if the local communities will say, We want you, we want Hinenu, we want young adults to come and live here with us, then we will encourage young adults from across Israel to come. So exactly in those days, in those weeks, we will decide whether we start this strategic move also up north. And then I hope we will have thousands of young adults who are part of those regional communities we have in Hinenu, both south and north, and really serve as pioneers of our days who are really trying to burn in hope and to try to show us as a society, we have hope. We have young adults who take responsibility for our prosperity, for our future. And also, I hope that it will be able to serve in front of our politicians to tell them, Listen, you're too detached. You have to understand what this generation is trying to boil and create. That's my dream for the near future.

So I'm going to ask you one last question that I wasn't planning to ask you, but as you speak, I am sure it is on the mind of 80% of the people who are listening to you and being inspired to. What are your political aspirations? Are we going to have Prime Minister Azizi?

I don't think so. I don't see myself as-

Because you're the person that we need. This generation of people... Let me put it different now instead of putting you on the spot. Do you have a sense that among these people, the hundreds who have moved down south and the thousands that you think are going to move to the north, we're going to see new political leadership emerge from this soon?

I'm sure.

You're positive.

I'm positive. Again, the sense of taking responsibility cannot remain only on the social sector. I think that the generation of our parents, and they actually say it, they were focused on promoting and building the social and economical and other sectors. And a lot of good people from that generation have decided to keep their hands out of the political sector. And we, as a generation, understand the price that is as a result of that decision of the past generation. We realized that we have to be a part of it. We have to turn... Being a politician is being a public servant. It must be the duty of the best people in Israel. I hope that we will be able to bring up this new generation of leaders who will really serve as national leaders of our society and of our people. I must mention before we end, I must mention the Jewish diaspora in this heroic actions, not only in contributing funds to allow huge strategic things that happen here, but also in doing Aliya. One of the big projects that I'm planning now, and maybe it's a call to action for our listeners, I'm working in a project.

We're building a project that we call Aliya la'negev or Aliya la'tzafon, and we aim to encourage young adults from all across the Jewish diaspora who are considering doing Aliyah and maybe experienced anti-Semitic actions during the last year and a half or during life in general, to really come and do that step and be a part of our communities in the south, and hopefully also in the north. And only then, only after we'll have those communities who are actually diverse, of Zionist Jewish people from Israel and from the diaspora, only then we will have this best model of society,, Zionist creation that really can bring hope. So to end, I'm really calling young adults from all across the Jewish people across the world to be a part of Hinenu.

That would be amazing. You're amazing, and your vision is amazing, and you and your colleagues are doing extraordinary things. And you're a huge gift to Israel, obviously. You're a huge gift to Zionism, but you're really also a gift to us. Because as I said at the outset, these are tough times, and we can do doomscrolling. We can spend too much time on our phone reading the wrong articles and get into bed at night and think, My God, this place is really just in very deep trouble. And listening to people like you just reassures us that there is a generation here in a reservoir of talent, belief, hope, inspiration. We're going to be okay. Because for people like you, we know we're going to be okay. And I could not be more grateful to you for the time. And I look forward to our next conversation.

And just to end with a blessing, we have 100 abducted people who are still in Gaza, and hopefully in the near future, in the near time, now they'll come back home.

Amen. Nothing more important. Thank you for bringing that up.

Thank you.

Later in the day, I was at Mincha, by which time everyone had heard. I made some remark to a person next to me about how absurd a way this is to live, to which he said,

“There’s no choice—Yemen needs to look like Gaza.”

I doubt that Yemen will end up looking like Gaza, but I also doubt that there’s much more Israeli patience for this. The headline above, from Sunday (the morning after) reads:

The interceptors that missed and the “learning curve race” against the Houthis. “There’s no defense that’s 100% effective—the only solution is to attack.”

The Houthis, though, are just a symptom of the larger problem—Iran. Rightly or wrongly, Israelis assume that if the Iran problem goes away, the Houthi problem goes away. And as I noted in a post last week, there is support—left, center and right—for an attack on Iran. Especially with Trump entering office and Iran at an unprecedented moment of weakness, many Israelis believe that this is the moment—and that another moment may not come in time.

Shortly after I’d posted those indicators of widespread support for an attack on Iran, which I suspected might strike people outside Israel as counterintuitive, the Jewish Federations of North America reached out and asked if I would have a conversation with Eric Fingerhut, President and CEO of the JFNA, about why Israelis don’t want to end the war before this is done—and whether we realize how dangerous the play could be.

I readily agreed—speaking with Eric is always a delight, and I always leave our encounters thinking anew. I’m grateful to Eric and the leadership of the JFNA for permitting us to share the brief conversation. The video our our discussion is below, available to everyone.

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

Eric D. Fingerhut is the President and CEO of The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA).

Prior to his appointment at JFNA, Mr. Fingerhut served as the President and CEO of Hillel International from 2013-19. At Hillel, he led the organization’s Drive to Excellence, which resulted in doubling the number of students engaged by Hillel each year to over 130,000 and the total funds raised each year to nearly $200M. His emphasis on recruiting, training and retaining top talent for the system, and on building a data and performance driven organization, have become models for the non-profit sector.

Mr. Fingerhut has also had a varied and distinguished career in public service and higher education. He served as Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents from early 2007 to 2011, leading Ohio’s system of public universities and colleges; as Ohio state senator from 1997 to 2006; and represented Ohio’s 19th congressional district in the U.S. Congress from 1993 to 1994. In 2004, he was the Democratic Party’s candidate for U.S. Senate.

Mr. Fingerhut received a juris doctorate from Stanford University Law School and a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. He and his wife Amy have two sons.

Since then, Shaked has graduated (and gotten married) and Israel has changed a great deal. Given all that has transpired here, it seemed appropriate to use the podcast music as an opportunity to offer a platform to young Israeli musicians whose work reflects the aches and hopes of today’s Israeli society.

I have lost count of how many listeners have written to say how moved they were by Shaked’s melody and performance. Some, assuming that she must be a musician on tour, have even written to find out where she’s performing next! I am beyond grateful to Shaked for allowing her talent to shape and enrich these hundreds of episodes over the years.

Beginning this week, we’ll be using a new song, by a young Israeli artist whose music is a direct response to the sadness and hope of our times. We’ll rotate between performers periodically, and for this next period, will be fortunate to hear Roni Bar Hadas’ song “If there’s still hope in the world.”

We’ll soon be running a column about Roni and her music. In the meantime, above, there’s a video of someone’s recording of her performing, and below, a studio-quality recording of the song.

The video above is subtitled, and both the English and Hebrew lyrics are provided below. We’re very grateful to Roni for her permission to use her music to accompany and inspire these conversations and look forward to our listeners getting to know more about her and her work in the weeks to come.

Nothing will ever be the same again Morning has risen once more and he still hasn't returned Just yesterday he promised to protect me under the blanket How can one even see a rosy future in the darkness? If there's hope in the world I'd give everything for it Love and not strength Another day, another breath From deep within the abyss I will smile again Even if it's not clear why Even if it's not clear how Even if it's not clear how Between flowing tears, staring in an empty room A chain of worries, the thread is choking Only in a moment of silence could I feel you close The window is open, waiting for some light to enter If there's hope in the world I'd give everything for it Love and not strength Another day, another breath From deep within the abyss I will smile again Even if it's not clear why Even if it's not clear how From deep within the abyss I will smile again Even if it's not clear why Even if it's not clear how Even if it's not clear how.

שום דבר כבר לא יהיה אותו דבר בוקר שוב עלה והוא עוד לא חזר רק אתמול הבטיח שישמור עלי מתחת לשמיכה איך בכלל אפשר לראות עתיד ורוד בתוך החשכה? אם יש בעולם תקווה אתן הכל בשבילה אהבה ולא כוח עוד יום עוד נשימה מתוך תהום עמוקה עוד אשוב לחייך גם אם לא ברור למה גם אם לא ברור איך בין דמעות שוטפות בוהה בחדר ריק שרשרת דאגות, החוט חונק רק ברגע של דממה יכולתי להרגיש אותך קרוב החלון פתוח מחכה שיכנס קצת אור אם יש בעולם תקווה אתן הכל בשבילה אהבה ולא כוח עוד יום עוד נשימה מתוך תהום עמוקה עוד אשוב לחייך גם אם לא ברור למה גם אם לא ברור איך

But we neglected to note that the language in the screenshot we posted was not his, as his post was originally in Hebrew, but that of Google.

Apologies for the oversight.

Israel has had a national “Day of Appreciation for IDF Wounded” for a number of years, but it’s never gotten much traction. Until this year—since 18,000 soldiers have been wounded in this war.

A group of women, the wives and partners of these soldiers, created a Forum for the Wives of Wounded Soldiers (the link is to their Facebook page — you can use Google Translate to read parts of it).

As part of their marking the day, yesterday, the Forum put out the video which appears at the top of this post, which we’ve subtitled and are sharing.

The subtitles translate both the voice of the narrator as well as the song that plays in the background.

The video, with the photos of the wounded men, their wives and their children conveys a small sliver of the trauma of a nation in which there are 18,000 such people, some wounded even more grievously.

The song that plays in the background is “To Hold on Tight,” a song written by Israeli songwriter, Akiva Turgeman, during the war—and that has captured the hearts and souls of many Israelis.

The official video for the song is below—the fact that in a tiny country like this, it has millions of views say something about how deeply his song and words touched people here.

And that, in turn, speaks volumes about what people here are feeling …

If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

The video for the song is above, while the lyrics are translated below.

Here’s the background to the song provided online (Google translated):

The singer and songwriter Akiva Turgeman releases a new single in response to the situation and period of the 'Iron Swords' war - "Hold on Tight".

Since that Saturday, Akiva has been enlisted on the northern border. On the bed in the shelled outpost on Mount Dov, he took a guitar and played "Hold on Tight" to himself. Suddenly, every word in the song took on a new meaning, as if crying out that the song must be released.

During a few days of R&R at home, he spontaneously entered the studio with musician and creator Stav Beger, and the song received its moving production and color, adding a scorched dimension to Akiva's singing that testifies to the period.

“To Hold on Tight,” by Akiva Turgeman

And now when everything slips through my fingers And now when every dream that comes is a nightmare I know this is a struggle To be or not to be And now when there's a black flag on my shore Such a storm of emotion, I can't see light anymore Even if everything around is still broken Inside I know this will pass Hold on tight Until the anger passes Until the taste returns Don't despair from falling Get up and start anew Hold on tight Until the sea splits I'm not giving up this time Because what was, was, the main thing is to start over I believe in the end this darkness will turn to light A small boat in stormy waters will find its shore I close my eyes and hold on tight Until it passes Because I know that you're still with me I'm not alone here, not alone here Hold on tight Until the anger passes Until the taste returns Don't despair from falling Get up and start anew Hold on tight Until the sea splits I'm not giving up this time Because what was, was, the main thing is to start over Because I know in the coldest nights I'm not alone here And even if waves are still breaking around me, I'm staying here, I'm staying here.