A ceasefire deal has just been reached.
In the past, Israelis have been united in elation and relief about the return of hostages, even at a high cost to national security. But not this time. Far-right MKs and ultranationalists had vigorously decried the deal, protesting any concession that would allow Hamas to hold on to power, no matter how small. What is behind their bitter dissent, and will this deepen rifts in Israeli society?
In this episode, recorded as the deal was still being finalized, Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi consider closure, family loyalty, and the basic value of derech eretz (common decency) in negotiating the return of the hostages, and why the lens for ultranationalists in Israel is so starkly different.
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A full transcript of this episode is available below.
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About
Thoughtful debate elevates us all. In For Heaven’s Sake, Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the future of Zionism in Israel and on the global stage.
The podcast draws its name from the concept of machloket l’shem shemayim, “disagreeing for the sake of heaven” and is part of the Institute’s iEngage Project.
Coming Home 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, Israel at War, Day 467. And together with the horrific week that the Nahal Brigade and the casualties in Beit Hanoun and the ongoing, really, in many ways, deaths of the stream of deaths of our soldiers. Today, our podcast is about the only thing that’s on all of our minds. And we called it “Coming Home.”
This evening, if all goes according to plan, Egypt, the United States, and Qatar are going to announce the deal for our hostages, and if all goes well by Sunday the first hostages could be coming home. Israel has a very popular comedy show, satire show, similar to Saturday Night Live. It runs differently but in prominence. And its advertisement for this evening had the whole crew, all eight or 10 of them, standing in front of the camera with their phones in their hands and looking at the phone and saying, did they announce the deal yet? Did they announce the deal yet? Is it signed?
In many ways, that’s where this whole country is. We are all looking at our phones, looking at our computers, looking at the television, just waiting. We’re in this moment of animated suspension—is the deal signed?
The operation to bring the hostages home was given the operational name in Hebrew, Derech Eretz, a name that many of you know. And for those of you who don’t, Derech Eretz is a term that has multiple meanings. Literally, Derech Eretz means the path to the land. So literally it’s the path home, the path to the land of the hostages. But Derech Eretz in our tradition means something far more powerful and critical.
Derech Eretz is the term for common decency. And in our tradition, we learn that Derech Eretz, common decency has to come before the law. If you’re just observing all of the 613 commandments, but you’re not a mensch, you’re not decent, there isn’t a common decency, there’s something wrong with your Torah and your Judaism. And Derech Eretz has to come first.
And by calling this, this is both their path home, bringing them back to the land, but they’re also declaring that bringing our hostages home is not a strategic necessity, even though it has strategic significance. It’s just common decency. It’s a country realizing that we owe our families and our hostages to bring them home in many ways, regardless of the costs. And the deal which is now on the table is the same deal that was on the table last May, eight months, nine months ago, a deal in three stages, but we’re not going to go into the details. You’ll all read about them.
The first stage, 31, are going to come home. And then after 16 days, we’re going to negotiate stage two. And hopefully in these three stages, all the living and all those who have already died will finally come home. And Israel is going to have to come to some ceasefire and permanent partial end of the war and withdrawing of most of our troops, etc.
But Yossi, what you and I wanted to talk about was how coming home is impacting on Israeli society. Where are we? How do we understand where Israelis are? This, you know, we know that a majority of people want the deal, but there’s something much deeper going on. And we wanna unpack that. And so I’m gonna start with you. Coming home, where do you see Israelis? How do you understand our society? Calling this Derech Eretz, common decency. Where are you? What do you see?
Yossi: What I want to say is that this is one of those moments of Israeli family that remind us why it’s worth living here, why we put up with the Israeli pressure cooker. On one level, that’s true. I think so many of us, you said that a majority of Israelis support the deal. The numbers are over 80%. And last night, I couldn’t sleep. I was just lying in bed thinking about is it going to happen? Will it happen? And I finally just gave up on sleep and follow the non-existent news because of course we weren’t being told anything last night.
So on one level, a strong majority of Israelis are having one of those Israeli family moments. But it’s more complicated. Like everything else about this war, we know that that 20% that opposed the deal. Many of them are actively opposing it. I don’t ever remember seeing demonstrations against a hostage deal. Last night we had, it’s true it was only hundreds, but nevertheless there were hundreds of right-wing demonstrators who blocked traffic at the entrance to Jerusalem, including members of Knesset, members of this government.
And this hostage deal more than any comparable event in our history is leaving us with a bitter taste. First of all, because of the divide. Secondly, because it’s leaving behind any number of hostages. We don’t know how many of them are alive. And there’s this nagging feeling that so many of us have that the government is not going to prioritize their release, that something is going to go wrong because we’re dealing with a government where things inherently go wrong. And there is such a fundamental lack of trust on the part of so many of us in this government that it’s also leaving this deep, deep sense of unease.
And what Israelis crave, I think more than anything else after almost a year and a half of war and the anguish of the hostage drama, is a sense of closure. But we all know we’re not getting closure. There’s not going to be closure.
And so, yes, we’re desperate to see those who are being released home. We’re desperate to see the fulfillment, the partial fulfillment of the promise of Derech Eretz. But I also think that in, I think that name is bittersweet. Because what I hear, and maybe it’s unconscious, but I also hear in that name a rebuke. A rebuke to those Israelis who had other priorities and for whom Derech Eretz was not there, their default position. So I don’t want to say what I’ve just said. I really want to just be in this moment of joy and relief. And again, part of me certainly is, there’s a deep ambivalence at the same time.
Donniel: You know, Yossi, as I hear you, we’ve never had since this war a single moment that’s not ambivalent. And the truth is it’s exhausting. It really is exhausting. I sense it’s not exhilaration. You don’t sense in the street any exhilaration. You sense, for those who are for the deal, that we’re doing the right thing. And it really is divided between those who make calculations and those who for whom common decency is self-evident.
And you know, one of the interesting things about common decency is that it’s usually not that common. And, it’s not that common. And also what one thinks is common decency is not for the other. It all depends on to what extent ideology, religion, beliefs enter into your core moral intuitions. And they always do inevitably. They inevitably do. And for those who are for the deal, I think as you said very beautifully, there’s a family moment where we just have to do this.
And there’ll be a time for us to bemoan the numbers of terrorists and the horrific nature of their crimes. Those people who are going to let out either into Gaza or Turkey, Egypt or Qatar or somewhere else in the Arab world. There’ll be time to bemoan all of that.
But for some, it’s just a time to stop calculating. But for others, they’re actually quite frightened of this common decency. They feel that this is a weakness, that in Israeli society, families have notions of common decency, but this is a country. And for them, the closure that they want.
This is really what we’re facing, Yossi, is we have two competing notions of closure. One is a closure to get back to life. And it’s true. And I think the secret of Israel is that we live in a crazy neighborhood under impossible conditions. And part of what we have to do is to deny.
Now, we have to learn not to deny to the level that it will create existential dangers like October 7th. But some measure of denial is necessary. Otherwise, what are you going to do here? We want to get back to our life. And these 80% feel that we can’t get back to our life when our family is still there. They’re still in these tunnels. There’s no return. We know we’ve changed the balance of power. We know we won the war in the larger macro sense. So that’s the closure they want. There’s a whole other group who have a very different notion of closure.
Yossi: It’s really an important point.
Donniel: Let me just spell out the two parts of it and then what you feel about it. For them, there’s two groups. One are people who are still holding on to some notion of complete victory. That until we don’t see Hamas waving a flag, we need this complete total military destruction. That’s one group and the other group, like they want to get back to October 6th, but a better one where Hamas is gone. There’s another group that wants to, that for them closure is going back to a pre-2005 withdrawal from Gaza.
And these two groups are meeting together. They’re very, very different. One has a fantasy slash messianic vision of holding onto the land. And the other one are very mainstream, responsible people who can’t, they can’t live with the defeat of October 7th without an erasure, erasing it. And that will only happen if Hamas is destroyed, not if our hostages come home.
Yossi: I think you’ve put it very well and, listening to you, I realize that part of the closure, the elusive closure that I crave is the reassurance that we’re still a decent society that functions as a family. And when I see people blocking the streets, to protest the homecoming of Israelis who’ve sat in these tunnels for almost a year and a half, the thing that strikes me the most is the shamelessness of these people. And you know, I can understand their position. And I do, and as you know, Donniel, that was my position in the first months of the war. I felt we hadn’t yet restored our deterrence and we couldn’t stop fighting until our deterrence was reasonably restored. And I think one of the reasons that such a strong majority of Israelis now support the deal is because we do realize that we’ve come a long way toward restoring the credibility of our deterrence.
But how do you stand up in a in a society that’s so desperate to get its people back and protest in the most vulgar way or the shamelessness of Ben Gvir, the far-right minister in charge of the police, who proudly said in a press conference that he is responsible for stopping this same deal that could have been achieved six months ago. Now this has driven Israelis crazy because what does that mean? It means that we actually could have had them home six months ago? That the same terms were on the table, but Netanyahu gave in to political pressure?
So this is part of the bitterness that I worry about in terms of the impact, the long-term impact on the Israeli psyche. And when I talk about closure, in the past we’d get our hostages back and there was a certain sense of relief and an expression of solidarity. We all came together, we made this tremendous sacrifice, whether it was justified or not. In the case of Gilad Shalit, the lone soldier for whom we exchanged 1,200 Hamas terrorists, including Yichia Simla, and I think most Israelis today would acknowledge that that was deeply problematic. But this is not that for most of us.
And yet there’s this feeling, you know, something, we’ve lost something in our familial capacity. And that’s part of what we’ve lost on October 7th in the aftermath. And this is not going to help us regain that.
Donniel: You know, it’s interesting. Here maybe our personalities again are coming forth. I have no bitterness in my heart right now. And I’m not shocked by the people who are demonstrating. I disagree with them, but I’m not shocked. And maybe, you know, part of a notion of family is also recognizing that people are going to be very different within your family.
And I have no love for Ben Gvir or Smotrich. It’s not like our opinions are very similar, but I’m not shocked by it. you know, and if I put it into some ideological terms, all nationalisms, but even all groups in different ways, larger groups, societies, you know, or especially people on the more ultra-nationalist spectrum, the greatest danger to ultra-nationalism, do you know what it is, Yossi? Family loyalties. You want to break family loyalties, the loyalty to the collective has to be over all, has to be more important than anything else. And a willingness to sacrifice, a willingness to die, a willingness to give to the well-being of the total, and where the individual finds their personal fulfillment in the well-being of the total.
And the family loyalty unit very often is very dangerous. So you’re—and I—are talking about the family. Don’t give in to the weakness of the family. Don’t give in to the weakness of those feelings. You’re supposed to be willing to keep on fighting and to sacrifice for this larger end.
And so I understand exactly why they see this deal as dangerous. And paradoxically, I, as family, like right now, you know, also, I don’t know after listening to the Blinken interview, I don’t know how much, whether we stopped the deal or whether it was Hamas. Just right now, I almost want to just let it go. And it is how we move forward. The question you just posed is a very serious question.
Yossi: I really appreciate it, Donniel.
Donniel: And part of the way you move forward, Yossi, is also like, at what point are we just going to move forward and stop this yesterday looking? Are you ready to stop that a little bit?
Yossi: In principle, yes, emotionally, emotionally, no. Because I don’t think it’s only about yesterday. Because the day after this war ends, we’re going to be facing a return to the judicial upheaval and a whole series, as we’ve talked about in previous podcasts, of assaults, laws that are being tabled to undermine freedom of the press. And so, I think that the problematics of how the hostage issue has been dealt with by this government is really emblematic of a whole wider range of problems. I really do appreciate the way you frame the need to absorb, to tolerate those among us who oppose the hostage deal within the framework of family. And I like that formulation very much.
And one of the really subversive elements of a nation as family, and here I mean subversive against the xenophobic right, is that if you take family seriously, you’re forced to expand your parameters to include people whose ideas are foreign to you. And so, for example, the far right always speaks about national solidarity and the Jewish family, but if you’re going to really take that seriously, half your people, and here I’m speaking about the Jewish people around the world, at least half the Jewish people are liberal. And so you, as a hardline nationalist, have to include liberals, universalists, in your tribal framework because that’s the meaning of family that you yourself have defined.
So here what you’re really doing is turning the tables and saying, well, those of us who believe in, let’s call it liberal nationalism, are bound by the constraints of family and that means being forced to tolerate what’s so instinctively obnoxious to us.
Donniel: To give this other group credit, October 7th brought out the family in them as well. A willingness to lay everything aside and to stand and to go under the stretcher and to try to save Israel and to fight for Israel.
Yossi: I think you have to explain that Hebrew saying that you just tossed in casually.
Donniel: Of going under the stretcher. Going under the stretcher is a term for those of you who were in the army, you know what it is. A stretcher requires four people to carry. You can’t carry a stretcher with three. And the truth is you can’t even carry it with four, because the weight is so heavy as you’re running that you need at minimum eight, if not 12, to constantly rotate all four before anybody becomes completely exhausted, unless it’s for 100 yards. But anything that takes a long time, basically you need a community to carry a stretcher. And in Israel, the ethos of going under the stretcher is the ethos of taking responsibility, joining the army, and carrying your, it’s another way of saying in English, think carrying your weight, but in a much more graphic manner. And this group has a sense of family, but this is the tension.
At what point does ideology, does politics tell people, you know, grow up? Now for us, this sense of bringing people home is our growing up. We’re willing to say I’m willing to take, I’m willing to pay the price. I’m willing to take risks. I know I would rather that the 1500 or so terrorists would all rot in jail. But I’m willing to take a risk and to say, you know what, there’s enough evil people on the other side. There’s tens of thousands of them. Another thousand or 1500 is not going to change the balance of power, especially at this moment.
But I can understand each one of these people who’s going to be let out and this like even those who are pushing the deal now afterwards are going to start kvetching and complaining and we’re going to look at the price and it’s like… but that’s just like an Israeli thing. It’s like, it’s just going to drive me crazy. But at this moment there’s it’s just as you said it’s never simple here.
I want to just put one other complexity that I’m feeling and I’m sensing in all the news feeds, we don’t know how many people are still alive. And we have a picture that 60 plus, you know, 31, we know the majority are alive, but a majority could be 16 and a majority could be 28. But what happens if it’s 20 who are alive right now? And what happens if in the second stage when the soldiers and the men between the age of, what is it, 50 and 70, how many of them are alive? So we’re on hold waiting for a deal, but, Yossi, we’re also on hold waiting to know—what is it that we’re even going to get? That’s very, very tough.
Yossi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what’s also on the minds of most Israelis today are the Bibas children. Are they alive? What condition are they in? And what condition are the young women in? And one, you know, you can’t bear to think what they might have endured. And so these are the issues that I think are gnawing at us and we won’t have closure on that till we actually see them home.
Donniel: And even when we see them home, Yossi,we’re not going to have closure because our rage, our anger, and at some point we’re going to have to just like, we don’t forgive, there’s a sense whereby you just have to go on. But I believe this is going to rip so deep into Israeli society, precisely because of the model of family that you mentioned. We’re bringing them home, the rage.
Yossi: The rage against Hamas.
Donniel: The rage, and then maybe rage again. Well, whenever there’s rage, you look for someone to blame because you just, it’s, you feel better when, when there’s somebody who’s responsible, whether, Hamas is easy, whether it’s the government or not, but it’s precisely because of the family that’s moving us to want to bring them home. But it’s that intense family, which is also going to be mourning. I’m reading articles, what’s going to happen to families who are going to discover right now, that their loved ones aren’t coming back alive. The emotional roller coaster that we are about to undergo here in this country is, I believe, going to be some of the most difficult moments since the beginning of the war.
Then on the side, you’re going to have those, you know, the prophets who are telling you, I told you so, you know, I told you so, you shouldn’t have made the deal. And I’m a little worried right now. I’m a little worried for how, as a people, we’re going to manage this really difficult time in the weeks ahead. Last words, Yossi, any thoughts?
Yossi: My takeaway from this conversation, I have any number, but the takeaway that really comes to mind for me personally is the need to accept the inevitability of these disagreements among us and to honor the fears and the pain of those who are on the other side of this issue and to really focus the angst and also the anger on those who are on the situation that’s leaving, again we don’t know how many, but leaving some of our hostages behind and the need to keep pressuring the government to honor its commitment to bring everyone home.
Donniel: That’s a really important point because that’s going to be a moment, really an explosive issue because the stages, if the government was ready to withdraw and to declare a ceasefire, you don’t need stage one, two, and three, unless that’s just a more efficient way to do it and to make sure that Hamas is living up to their side of the deal and giving us time to put in place various mechanisms that we need for the day after.
But in the back of everybody’s mind is, are we going to somehow say what Hamas wants in stage two is a complete ceasefire, which we’re not willing to, and Smotrich is already declaring that he’ll support this deal on one condition, Yossi. Maybe you should comment on this too. He’s going to support this deal on one condition, that Israel commits to continuing to fight Hamas until they’re eradicated. So if we’re willing to do that, he’s for the deal. But what does that mean?
Part of deal is all…you never get everything you wanted. There’s no such thing as a deal in which the other side has to give and you don’t have to somehow also give. So I’m for the deal as long as we don’t give anything? It’s… there’s gonna be a mess going on here right now. Any thoughts about that argument?
Yossi: We talked about this, I think it was in our last episode, about how the Israeli public generally hasn’t faced its internal inconsistencies of wanting the hostages, wanting total victory. Well, this is a moment of truth, and the Israeli public has lined up with not getting everything that it wanted in favor of the hostages. And we have not by any means heard the last word from Smotrich and that amp.
And again, my fear is that those who may pay, God forbid, who may pay the price will be those left behind for the later stages of the deal. And there’s still plenty of room for the opponents of this deal to sabotage the next stage.
You know,so Derech Eretz. What is Derech Eretz? What’s common decency? Is it common? Are we going to be able to see this through to the end? Very, very…I don’t know, joyful, sad, complicated, ambivalent and politically fraught times are ahead, but sometimes just connecting to what is Derech Eretz sometimes is a source of strength.
Yossi, pleasure being with you.
Yossi: Good to be with you.
Donniel: Let’s see what happens. Today is day 467. And maybe the hope of them coming home is a little more realistic today. Be well, my friends.
