Famine Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi friends, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute, and this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, in collaboration with Ark Media and the Shalom Hartman Institute, our series, “Israel at War,” today is day 662.

And today we are forced to deal with the consequence of this war, that for many of us is almost unimaginable. For many people around the world, it’s been a reality for a very long time. But it’s a new reality in Israeli public discourse. Our theme on day 662 is famine.

For most of the war, the public discourse in Israel was about winning. It was about the causes of the war, what caused the war, the instigation of Hamas, the massacre. But for a very long time, the focus is on winning. And we’re divided into two stories or two narratives of winning. One is winning by stopping the war and returning the hostages, and the other one is winning by defeating Hamas. That’s the concentration. And it’s as if everything else has been on hold. We don’t talk about anything else. The consequences, the consequences in the world, the consequences to Gaza. It’s like we’re fighting a 660-day war under the myth that it’s a six-day or a 12-day war.

And all of a sudden, the consequences, this reality of famine…

Yossi: We’ve never fought a war this long.

Donniel: Never. And we’ve never had to deal with the ongoing repercussions. We’ve always had to deal with the repercussions of Israel’s place in the world and what people say about us. But this total occupation with the war and its consequences is a new experience. And it’s devastating. To be accused of instigating famine, it’s almost unimaginable.

And so that’s what we’re going to talk about. It’s here. And it’s here, not just in the criticisms of the press overseas, the prime minister of Israel, who said there’s no famine in Gaza. Admits things are bad in Gaza.

Yossi: He said it three days ago.

Donniel: Exactly. He said there’s no famine in Gaza.

Yossi: There’s no famine, three days ago.

Donniel: And then last night, after President Trump said the pictures are bad, he aligned with him and says, the situation in Gaza is challenging. Even Minister Smotrich, who, while declaring that he doesn’t want to retake Gush Katif, the settlement block, because it’s too small for him, he wants to retake all of Gaza because it’s part of the promised land. But he said the world will not let us win if we starve two million Gazans. He admitted the term. So now all of a sudden Netanyahu, Israel’s military spokesperson, who just two days ago said there’s no hunger in Gaza—there’s hunger in Gaza. There’s famine.

And so there’s three questions we want to concentrate on. The first, what’s your take on the reality, this moment that we’re in, this horrific moment? How do we account for it? What is it? The second, what are its causes? And the third is, what are our obligations? What do we need to do? So, Yossi, how do you understand this moment that we’re in right now?

Yossi: Well, there’s the technical or practical questions, and then there are the historical questions, the moral questions, questions about who we are as a people.

In terms of the practicality of what this moment is, what’s actually happening there, you know, you and I have done a dance over these long months, periodically, going back to the question of what we know, what we don’t know. And there’s still a lot that we don’t know about this.

Donniel: About the hunger.

Yossi: About the hunger. We don’t know the extent of it. We don’t know if Hamas is inventing numbers. Well, we can assume Hamas is inflating numbers.

Donniel: We know. We could actually say, we know they are.

Yossi: We know they are. What we do know now is that there is hunger. Again, we don’t know the dimensions. We don’t know if starvation is mass, starvation is an imminent threat. But the very fact that even the government, the Israeli government, is owning up to it now means that the dimensions must be greater than we’ve assumed until now.

And, you know, Donniel, I struggle with the question of, and you and I, you know, when we continue this conversation offline before the podcast afterwards, and we try to understand—how did we get to this point, why has Israeli society been so apathetic? And I look at myself, I try to examine myself, and I didn’t believe that there was starvation in Gaza up until the last few days. I didn’t believe it. And the main reason I didn’t believe it is because the international community in the U.N. and NGOs have been crying wolf almost from the beginning of this war. You go back to October 2023, and the U.N. is warning of imminent hunger. And it wasn’t true.

And so the question…

Donniel: Even before the war.

Yossi: Even before the war, right. The blockade was creating mass famine. Now the Palestinians are saying we destroyed a beautiful life in Gaza. But before the war, Gaza was an open-air prison. It was a vast concentration camp. So there have been so many lies, half-truths, exaggerations that we haven’t known what to believe.

And I’ll give you one example. The galvanizing photograph, this terrible photograph of a Palestinian mother holding her dying child. You’ve seen that picture. When I saw that picture, I said, “That’s it.” I have to say something. I have to do something. I started making calls to people I knew who might have some connection with the government. And I was going to write an article.

And then I wake up the next day, and there’s a report that the photograph was actually a lie. Not the image itself. The image was of a Palestinian child who was dying of cerebral palsy. And they cropped the photograph. Did you see that? His brother, his older brother, was in the picture, and he looks perfectly healthy. They cropped the picture. And that image went viral. That was on the front pages of the major newspapers, from the New York Times to The Guardian. And so you see that, and you say, “How did I get taken in again?” They did it again. I stepped in it again. And you feel like such a fool.

And then you realize, well, okay, that’s on the media. The media needs to own up to its failures. But I have my own moral failures that I have to own up to. And I can’t hide behind the fact that there was manipulation. And it’s a very interesting question about why Palestinians thought they could get away with that. Why it was even necessary, if there is starvation, why choose an image as your emblematic symbol, your emblematic image for starvation, an image that’s not true? That’s a whole other interesting question. But again, those are questions that journalists, The New York Times needs to ask itself that question.

As an Israeli citizen, I have a whole different set of questions I have to ask.

Donniel: So if I would summarize, what’s reality now for you is something’s come home.

Yossi: Yeah.

Donniel: A story that, for multiple reasons, you felt that you needed to deny. It was almost as if you were going to join the blood libel.

Yossi: Yeah. And I didn’t think that’s what I was doing. I just simply didn’t believe it. You didn’t believe it. But I was suppressing it.

Donniel: Right. I share very much—my sense of where we are right now has a lot of similarities with your analysis. But with a little more moral criticism of us, if I can. I don’t want to moralize, but it’s very convenient for us to say that we didn’t know. Because the truth is, I think we did know. And while it was never, I don’t believe it was as bad as, and I know what is it, the Gazan Health Authority, what are they called?

Yossi: The Health Ministry.

Donniel: The Health Ministry.

Yossi: The Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry.

Donniel: Numbers of theirs are completely distorted and they count. You know, 70 people a day could be killed and it has nothing to do with 70 and many of them could be Hamas terrorists in battle. And just the whole counting is something that it’s almost like you’re there’s an onslaught. But while all of this has been going on, we know that the nature of the war in Gaza is going to create a humanitarian crisis. That’s what makes it so hard.

Okay, so you could blame Hamas and it’s true, and a lot of it is on there. I’m not doing, now, an accounting of what we did wrong, but we know you can’t go into Gaza and fight Hamas. You could blame Hamas for it, but you can’t go into Gaza, limit the distribution of food, limit access to food just by mere virtue of your bombing and your war, and not think that there’s going to be a humanitarian crisis. And I think we chose to hide what we know. We don’t want to see it. We don’t want to talk about it, but we knew. Who doesn’t know?

So maybe this picture was false. Maybe we know it was false. And we know there were pictures taken from Yemen presented as if they were in Gaza. We know all of the above. But when you look at the thousands of people dashing to get food, people who have access to their own food don’t do that. When you see the kids running around with their pots trying to get water, people who have access to running water don’t do that.

And we know that Israel said over and over again that the only way to destroy and to defeat Hamas was to create a siege. Siege was part of our strategy. It wasn’t to create famine, but it’s to create siege. But what do you think you’re doing when you’re creating a siege? What do you think we’re doing?

And I think part of where we are right now is I think we have to confront a deep and profound moral failure of Israel and our people. Where we are now, we can’t run away from it. We can’t hide it. We can’t play in the New York Times. And I appreciate you saying both sides. And I’m not denying it, but we have to be very careful because, again, the New York Times, it’s so comfortable to slip into all the distorted stories. Let’s quote President Trump. I don’t know if that’s good for our business.

Yossi: Let’s not.

Donniel: I don’t know if it’s good for our business. What did he say yesterday? He said, “The pictures are hard to deny.” And it’s not of that emaciated child. And I’m not claiming how many people are dying. We’ve done something. And this war, we haven’t taken into account the moral consequences to civilian life. And I think—what’s the reality now? The reality now is that we are losing because we didn’t. And the reality is, I believe, that Israel and Jews and even Judaism now have an asterisk to sustain.

Yossi: Yeah. Yeah. The bright red warning over our failed food policy was the casualties among the desperate Palestinians coming to the food distribution points who were being killed and wounded by Israeli soldiers. And I’m not blaming the Israeli soldiers. To be in a situation, and any of us who have been in a situation where you’re confronting riots and you feel physically threatened and you know you could be in mortal danger… I blame the system. I blame the army for not preparing our soldiers, for not adequately training them, for not giving them the right control equipment so that all they have is their gun.

But more deeply, the failure was the government’s entire approach to the food policy. This was a failure from the beginning.

Donniel: So here, I don’t want to stop you, but I’ll just frame it. You’re now shifting a little bit into the causes. How did we get to this crazy place? And so now that’s… what, that’s, that’s for me…

Yossi: But that, for me, this was the bright red line.

Donniel: This is the red line. So go, expand. Say more. Like this situation, I can’t imagine in your lifetime you would associate with Zionism, with Israel, with the Jewish people that we allowed hunger. We allowed famine. We disregarded all of this. How did we get here?

Yossi: Now, look at the language that you used. Very careful language. And I appreciate that. We allowed famine.

Donniel: I don’t know if I was if that was as intentional as it needed to be. But give me credit. I’ll take credit.

Yossi: Well, but there’s… but you know, there’s a deeper question. We’re being accused of having deliberately caused famine. I don’t think I believe that. I don’t think that was the intention, even of this terrible government. Nevertheless, there’s a permeable line between intention and negligence. At what point does negligence become criminal negligence? And this is what we have to own up to now. And there are lots of parties to this that have a share in this failure. Look, the UN has a very big share by allowing Hamas to control its food supply.

Donniel: You know, the New York Times denies that? The latest article is that an unnamed military spokesperson of the army said there is no proof that Hamas ever invaded the UN food distribution system.

Yossi: Look, I don’t know, but I do know. I know that that is a ludicrous claim. Absolutely ludicrous. And anyone who’s been paying attention here for the last nearly two years knows what Hamas has done and also knows that Hamas is partly responsible. We are mostly responsible, but Hamas is partly responsible as well for the fatalities at the food distribution points. And again, I’m not trying to shift the blame from us, but I am looking at the constellation of guilt. And the UN would not cooperate with our food distribution system, claiming that it doesn’t outsource food distribution, which is a lie. All over the world, the UN outsources to third parties food distribution, but it wouldn’t work with us.

Donniel: Okay, United Nations, one cause, two. What are the other causes?

Well, clearly Hamas, but what we have to own is our share here. And it doesn’t matter to me if we are overwhelmingly responsible or if we’re a partner in this crime, because it has become a crime. We have ample shares in this disaster. And where I feel I need to own up is not facing this sooner.

Donniel: I want to point to two causes, one troubling and one profoundly disturbing. So this is a trigger warning. I’m going to move from troubling to disturbing.

Yossi: So you’re going to give us the bad news first and then the worse news. Yeah.

Donniel: I think the first cause for this goes back to something. And I can’t tell you how angry I am, because I know we could have done better. Like if you can’t do better, I can understand. I can understand that you can’t fight a war in Gaza without civilian casualties. I understand that. And I’m not blaming anybody. It’s terrible. It’s a tragedy. But I know there’s certain things. Not everything in life you can work out and not every problem has a neat solution to it.

But it’s 662 days since we started to attack a densely populated area. And I don’t believe at one time we actually thought through what we want to do, where we want to go, and what the consequences are. We had rhetoric. We had aspirations. It’s not even a strategy. It’s even a real articulated vision of—what do we want. Now, I don’t blame anybody in the first month or two. We were reeling from the tragedy. We were reeling from the massacres.

But since then, there is an absolute refusal to ask what is your real, honest, implementable solution for this reality other than a fantasy. We’re going to wipe out Hamas. Okay, I appreciate that. We’re going to bring the hostages back too. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Through military pressure. I appreciate that. Aspirations aren’t a problem.

But every single time, we had to actually plan something and a plan that would bring in our best minds that would put together serious solutions, we never did it. And what makes me so infuriated is that every single bomb of the 12-day war against Iran was planned. It was planned for months. We now know the beginning of the planning started in November for an attack that happened in June. Six months. Every single target would put people in place. Our abilities to take into account difficult things, to plan almost impossible things.

For 600 days, we have yet to put a serious plan forward. What do you plan on doing with the population here? And that’s why we fall in love with the Trump Party. Oh, they’ll leave. So this is one, you know. What about this? I said, you know, this mythic city which was supposed to house a million people. Really? We are—I hope this is not—We’re bullshitting our way through a human tragedy. And you can’t do that. You can’t go to war and kill and have such total strategic disregard for the serious challenges you face.

Why are we here? This is the troubling one. Because we were beyond mediocre. Now, that mediocrity might be a result of the government. It might be a result of individuals who didn’t plan things or whatever constellation you might want to have. And you can blame this one and that one. There’s nothing—still to this day, there is no intelligent articulation of what Gaza should be tomorrow. Forget who should own and rule Gaza. Here it is. You have two million people. What do you… You can’t engage in a war and do this. This is the troubling one.

And you could see. And our GHF solution… Look, yes, we’re offering a solution. How did you plan it? Is it in sufficient places? Is the distribution safe enough? Safe enough including for the Israeli soldiers, our kids who have to guard it. What do you plan on doing? You had months. It was just like pulled out like at this… I’m sure someone’s going to say, “Oh, we planned it.” And if you actually had time and this is what you came up with, you came up with what systems where people are supposed to walk through and quietly, somehow, separate it from the contractors and the army.

Part of it is just—we have been conducting a 660-something day war without ever putting through long-term plans and we’re just standing in place. You want to stop me now before I get to the disturbing…

Yossi: Yeah, the worst one. Yeah, you know, over the course of the war, I’ve done a fair number of media interviews and I’ve been often challenged to explain, “How can I justify this war when you have far-right ministers sitting in government?” And listen to the rhetoric that they’ve been saying. And the answer that I gave, the defense that I gave, was they’re not establishing policy. They’re mouthing off. And that’s true. That’s true. That’s true to a point.

But—and this is a big “but”—what really brought us to this point was not Smotrich and Ben Gvir. It wasn’t the ideologically immoral. It was the amoral. It was the fact that the Likud and Netanyahu, above all, didn’t care one way or the other. They didn’t set out to have a policy of creating starvation. But the fact that they were setting in motion the conditions that would lead to that, that’s not their consideration. And it feeds into what you’re saying. It reinforces what you’re saying. Because there was no forethought. It was part of the way in which they’ve turned this war from a strategy to a series of tactics.

And here Smotrich and Ben Gvir did have an influence because they were preventing Netanyahu, who I’m not absolving by any means, but they were his alibi for not creating a serious strategy. And so you stumble into one series after another of disastrous miscalculations. And this is the end result.

Donniel: You know, I think one of the things that we have to officially change is what we said at the beginning, which was true, that these far-right-wing ministers aren’t in the security cabinet and they’re not determining the war. I think that’s just simply false. Netanyahu has spoken to them, listened to them, and worried about their veto and leaving the government. Since day 30 or 50 of the war.

Yossi: No, you’re right. But what they have vetoed, Donniel, what they have vetoed is exactly what you were speaking about earlier, which was a plan. That’s what they vetoed. So they helped create the conditions.

Donniel: A plan. And rejecting a ceasefire and attacking again. And they have been far more powerful. But I want to go to what you called amoral, because now we’re coming to what I think I’m worried about. And I’m hearing from a lot of our listeners, and I’m hearing from myself—when you don’t care, when millions of people forget, I don’t know if they’re starving—are they hungry? When you institute for whatever reason, and you don’t think about the consequences, are you not responsible? Is that amoral?

Well, what frightens me is that October 7th activated what I call victim nation. Before the war, we had startup nation. At a prior podcast, I spoke about warrior nation. The difference between a nation at war and when you become warrior nation, what that does to you. But for 662 days, Israel has been victim nation. And that victimhood just shut down any of our compassion. When you’re totally consumed by your victimhood, you don’t see. And every time people spoke to us and said, “Do you see what’s going on in Gaza?” What would we do? “Did you see the pictures of October 7th? Like, what do you want from us? Do you see the pictures? It’s Hamas.”

This victimhood has consumed us. And I think part of the problem is, its consequence has been a silencing of a deep part of our moral conscience. And I think there’s an absolute moral failure, not an amoral failure, a moral failure. And a lot of people are asking me, I have someone who wrote me, he says, “Donniel, you speak about the trouble to committed. You know, you’re troubled about some of the things that Israel is doing, but you’re still committed. When do you stop being committed?”

And I don’t stop being committed. We failed. And this hunger is just sitting there. And it’s looking at Israeli society and you and I, and I know, we’re talkers, so you can blame us for just talking, but like, at some point, there’s something that’s disturbing. And I look at Israeli society, and I look at the leadership, and I look at the conversation. And I think we have to recognize that it’s not just the byproduct of callousness. I think there’s been a shutdown. I don’t think Israeli society overnight has become an immoral society. But victim nation makes moral calculations impossible. You don’t see them. And hunger, famine, has come.

Yossi: Yeah, I struggle with that question of whether Israeli society has lapsed into a victim identity. And I’m not at all convinced that that’s the root of what’s happened. I agree with you that there’s been a major shutdown of our moral discourse. And this is a society which 40 years ago, in the middle of a war, the first Lebanon war, when our Christian allies massacred 1,000 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, 400,000 Israelis, we were at that time, we were 4 million people, 10% of the country gathered in a public square in Tel Aviv to say, not us. This cannot be us. And now this is us. And we’re silent.

Donniel: Something has happened, then. Because back then, we…

Yossi: Yes. Oh, I agree. I agree with you. I agree with you. I don’t agree with the reason for it. I don’t think that we now see ourselves as victims, especially after our military successes. I think something in… that is restored. And maybe I’m about to contradict myself here. And that’s…

Donniel: That’s fine. We don’t care. That’s fair. We’re thinking things through. That’s fair. That’s fair to be… We don’t have to be… Things are hard.

Yossi: So it occurred to me the other day that we made a fundamental mistake in framing October 7th through the Holocaust. What did we say? Pogrom. Everyone. Everyone said the largest—and we’re still saying it—the largest number of Jews killed since the Holocaust. And that’s not the issue. That’s not the framing. The framing is this was the largest number of Jews massacred since the creation of the state of Israel. That’s what was important about October 7th. And it was a threat, not to our victimhood, it was a threat to our power. And we have said this very often in our conversations. What October 8th was all about was Israeli society affirming that we’re not a victim nation and we’re not going to stay in that place.

Donniel: So, but you know what the problem is? There’s no rational reason why, after everything that we’ve done, we should still see ourselves as victim nation. But I think we still do. And the combination between victim nation and warrior nation has a moral toxicity that we have to give an accounting for and how they’re both able to exist for so long together. That inconsistency has room in the human psyche. But if it’s okay with you, unless you…

Yossi: Yeah, there’s something else I want to say here.

Donniel: Please, come.

Yossi: Which is that when I try to understand the Israeli psyche in relation to Palestinian suffering, try to understand my own attitudes, but also my surroundings, I come back to those outrageous ceremonies that Hamas staged when the hostages were being released. And especially when the two Bibas children who had been murdered in captivity were returned in a festive ceremony with thousands of people. There was music, whole families came. Those images had a profound impact. I’m not justifying, I’m explaining. It had a profound impact on how when Israelis look at Palestinian society…

Donniel: Fair enough. Fair enough. So in addition to victim nation, there’s furious nation. There’s multiple facets to it.

Yossi: Oh, I think that rage nation is much more important.

Donniel: So maybe I think that rage nation reaffirmed the victimhood, but I don’t care, who gives a damn. So call it rage nation, victim nation, warrior nation. There’s so many nations. All of them together have created this profound moral blindness and flaw.

So now we have an asterisk. Israel has created a famine. New York Times—one of the worst humanitarian crises in the 21st century. It’s interesting. And again, all of the Israeli apologists will all say, when was the last time you traveled to Sudan? You know what I mean? We’ll leave it aside for now.

Yossi: No, no, no. It’s not an aside. And it’s not being an apologist because it also helps explain why we couldn’t see what was happening.

Donniel: I know. I know. I know that. I appreciate that.

Yossi: You know, one example, forgive me for venting right now.

Donniel: Go. Yossi, I love you. Go.

Yossi: I have to vent. The New York Times again, the New York Times published an op-ed which became instantly renowned by an Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omar Bartov.

Donniel: He’s the one who said, I’m a genocide scholar and this is…

Yossi: This is what I see. Yes. And the headline is, I’m a Genocide Scholar, and I Know Genocide When I See It.

Donniel: And I Know Genocide When I See It.

Yossi: The opening line tells us exactly what this piece is about. In that opening line, he refers to the Hamas attack of October 7th. He can’t bring himself, the genocide scholar, can’t bring himself to call it a massacre, a mass atrocity. I didn’t need to read beyond that to know exactly where this is going because what his whole argument was based on is that this is a one-sided war. Hamas doesn’t appear. Hamas isn’t factor. And this also…

Donniel: Did you get it off your chest?

Yossi: No, but you know, it’s a start.

Donniel: But I appreciate it because the truth is, once I start on this, once I start you or anybody, it’s…

Yossi: It’s part of the problem.

Donniel: You know, I could recommend Matti Friedman’s remarkable article.

Yossi: Oh, I’m so glad you brought it up.

Donniel: Where is it?

Yossi: In the Free Press.

Yossi: In the Free Press where he shows like what we know, what we don’t, and what we’ve had to deal with in constantly defending ourselves against these types of laws.

Yossi: Must reading the best piece on this subject that I’ve seen.

Donniel: An excellent piece. But at the end that asterisk is now here. And Jews around the world are feeling it. Israelis who are finally, you know, you can get out of Israel. There’s actually airplanes leaving Israel. Wherever an Israeli goes now, they’re frightened. The idea of even having an Israeli or a Hebrew symbol, not to speak of a kippah, anywhere in Europe… it’s not even a thought. So as we’re finally able to get out of, you know, this is rage nation, victim nation, warrior nation, exhausted nation in need of a vacation, they’re now—you can’t go.

Yossi: Vacation won’t do it. Vacation. This is the country in need of deep therapy.

Donniel: So now, so I want to ask the last question. There’s this asterisk.

And again, we’re not talking the genocide conversation today, and that technical debate and Brett Stevens’ article on it, on genocide, was also highly recommended to look at whether it is genocide or not genocide. And another article that I want to highly recommend is Ross Douthat’s editorial. It’s not a response to Brett Stevens, but it’s saying, I don’t care what it is, what you call it. So we left all aside.

Yossi: And he has been a friend. He has been a strong supporter.

Donniel: He says, like, something wrong is going on here. So leaving all that aside, there’s now this asterisk on us. It’s an asterisk on Zionism. As I said, some people—can I still be troubled and committed or now is the time for me to be the troubled uncommitted? When do I say enough? And I never want us to say enough because I want to fight for my Israel. So how do we repair this? Could we repair this? Could we repair this stain? Because we’re leaving it aside. What do we do?

Yossi: Let me be cynical, a cynical Jew for a moment and ask the question, why are we the only country that worries that a moral stain, even a profound moral stain will define our right to exist?

Donniel: No, I didn’t say that. Did you notice what you just did?

Yossi: No, no, I know you didn’t.

Donniel: No, but did you notice you’re just moved? And here, could I argue with you?

Yossi: Please.

Donniel: Vociferously? With my friend? You’re letting yourself off. I didn’t say that. You’re having an argument with somebody else right now. And I appreciate that that argument is there, but I didn’t ask that.

Yossi: You’re right.

Donniel: I didn’t ask that. And it’s so much more convenient.

Yossi: But you see, that’s the mechanism.

Donniel: It’s the mechanism. It’s like, okay, so can I just, it’s Donniel and Yossi.

Yossi: We’re so defensive because we’re so wounded. We’re so under attack.

Donniel: I appreciate that.

Yossi: You’re right.

Donniel: And I understand, but that’s not the issue.

Yossi: You’re right.

Donniel: How do we, we’re here, we have a right to be, I’m not even interested in talking about my rights. I know other people want to, but for us now, in our conversation, there was a letter, there was anything we could do. Or is it just too late?

Yossi: Look, there was a letter, there was a letter—it’s not too late. There was a letter. First of all, God willing, all of the pressure has stopped mass starvation. At least we have a good chance of stopping it because there’s now a mass infusion of aid.

Donniel: It’ll take months. But yes, to overcome the impact. Okay. That’s one part. Fair enough. Good. What else?

Yossi: The necessity of drawing red lines in our discourse over Israel. There was a very fine letter that Rabbi Art Green and a few others wrote when hundreds of rabbis across the denominations, including Orthodox rabbis signed, saying basically, not this, until this.

Donniel: And they didn’t walk away from Israel.

Yossi: Oh, it was a very good letter because the letter affirmed the right of Israel to defend itself, but beyond that, it affirmed the legitimacy of this war. I didn’t agree with everything in there, but I felt that they were mindful of the need to protect Israel, even as they’re criticizing. And for me, that’s in some way, that’s the balance. You have to remember that we’re facing a lynch mob, and our legitimacy is under question, under assault all the time. And at the same time, we must critique our failures, especially when you have a government like this and a war like this. The Jewish people must critique itself, even in the middle of war, especially in the middle of the war.

Donniel: You know, this goes back to one of the core features of Jewish law and the path of repentance. Do you know how repentance starts? It doesn’t start by committing to change. That’s a later stage. It starts with recognizing and admitting what you did wrong. And I think part of the way this, how does this change? There’s a few things.

First, we have to say, yes, we failed. In the midst of this crazy environment, and I know I have friends who say, “Which country ever admits that it’s wrong and which country ever has to, can’t, allowed to defend itself?” It doesn’t matter. There’s now an asterisk on Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. And amongst our anti-Semites, it’ll never change, but amongst our friends, we’re losing. And we have to start by declaring openly, this has been a failure. “Chatanu,” we have sinned. This was wrong, one, whether by commission or omission, whatever it was that we did.

Yossi: The very fact that we allowed it to get to this point.

Donniel: And with all the story. The second is we have to commit to change. And commit to change, I think needs two dimensions to it. Otherwise, we’re never going to free ourselves. The first is not just allowing food to come in. Or now, you know, parachuting food in by the Israeli army and the Emirates or whoever it is, and the Jordanians. That’s not a plan. Throwing food at Gaza is not a plan for starvation or for hunger. It’s just not. It’s just not. We have to have a plan.

Again, let’s actually say, what are we going to do now for the Gazans? We want to destroy Hamas, but we have destroyed life. We’ve created a famine. What’s your plan? And not, oh, we have to stop the blaming Hamas, all of the above. We have to put forth a serious plan that represents some vision on recognition of our moral responsibilities for this war with all of its complexity.

And I think the only way this asterisk is ever going to go away is if we actually show through action and policy that we want a different future with the Palestinians. And I don’t know what it’s going to be. And I can’t tell you how to do it. And I don’t have simple solutions. But unless Israeli society actually declares, Palestinian lives are created in the image of God, and we as Jews have come home, and we have to make sure that Palestinian rights are preserved, unless we start from the midst of this moral failure, reach a different moral height, that asterisk is going to remain.

We could talk about it more, but it’s just, I’m telling you, I am so upset. This is not my Israel. This is not my Jewish people. And we need to reclaim something. Yossi, this is our time for final thoughts.

Yossi: You phrased it beautifully, Donniel. I have one deep disagreement. And I think, I actually think you’ll more or less agree with what I’m going to say.

Donniel: So our disagreements are ones where you disagree with me, but I agree with you.

Yossi: No, I’ll tell you. No, no, I think my disagreement is in the way you put it. And I don’t think that you meant it this way, but it could be heard that way. Okay. That is when you said we have to stop blaming Hamas and focus on ourselves.

I believe that the challenge for us at this unbelievably complicated time is twofold. On the one hand, to deal with the lynch mob and not to let go of defending ourselves from the outrageous campaign of lies that we’re subjected to, while at the same time, relentlessly examining ourselves and subjecting ourselves to the deep and wrenching process of Teshuva, of penitence.

And in that sense, I’ve spoken about this before, Donniel, we need to learn, Jews need to learn to speak two languages about Israel. There’s an external language directed to our vilifiers, and there’s an internal language in which the existence of the lynch mob doesn’t matter. What matters is our own moral integrity.

Donniel: In this context, I want to reference everybody to yet another article.

Yossi: We’ve referenced more articles in this episode than all the episodes put together.

Donniel: There’s a bunch of serious people who wrote some stuff. This one was in Sapir, the journal Sapir, by Toba Hellerstein. It’s called “Actually, Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts.” It’s also a phenomenal article and recommended. There’s like four articles that could really frame a lot of our conversation.

And part of what she was saying, you distinguish between an internal conversation and an external one. And part of what she was saying is that you win the external one by communicating your internal feelings to them, because your facts don’t matter. And so much of our explanation has nothing to do with actually analyzing what the other person is thinking or what will convince them. It’s speaking to what will convince us. And what works, she says, is not facts, but actually the two conversations that you mentioned, talk about who we want to be.

I actually think that this conversation of reclaiming who we are, and yes, admitting that we’re flawed, admitting our problems, talking about who we want to be, could be very helpful, again, not for the anti-Semites, but for our friends. And okay, final thoughts. This is Israel at War, Day 662. It’s been a hard one, and I very much appreciate talking it through with you, Yossi.

Yossi: I do too, Donniel.

Donniel: Thank you.