The following is a transcript of Episode 101 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is For Heaven’s Sake, our special series, Israel at War. And today is day 65. It’s nine weeks already, Yossi. I don’t remember a nine-week war. You know, we’ve had operations that lasted years. Nine weeks. How are you doing? What are you thinking about?

Yossi: Well, you know, it’s the third light of Hanukkah, and I’ve been getting a lot of strength from the holiday, more than usual. I mean, I love Hanukkah. Obviously, everybody loves Hanukkah. But there’s something this year that’s especially powerful and direct. Lighting the candles, it connects me with the whole Jewish people and with our soldiers and with the hostages, really thinking of the hostages, especially given the testimony that’s starting to come out. 

It’s so hard and thinking about 137 Israelis in the depths of the earth, in darkness. And feeling the power of what we do, and we so often take these rituals for granted. But when you connect to the essence of the ritual, I find that it somehow gives me the strength to cope with everything else that feels otherwise so overwhelming. How about you, Donniel, where are you at?

Donniel: I’m experiencing Hanukkah in North America. I’m on the road. I’m coming back in a few days. And as an Israeli, it’s very hard to celebrate holidays outside of Israel. We were spoiled. We’re spoiled people where holidays define your reality in Israel. Here, okay, I light a candle. I light a candle. They don’t define my reality. It’s a very different experience.

Part of what’s defining my reality, we’ll deal with this more in the subject of today’s podcast, but I’m very much watching and feeling the war in the context of North American Jewry’s experience this week. And the dominant experience that I felt, and maybe if I would put it into a Hanukkah context, when I heard the testimony of the three presidents of Yale, Harvard, and MIT, it was the antithesis of light. 

I sat there watching. I want to give a word to what I felt, but I don’t even have a word. Was it anger? No. Was it incredulous? That’s just something you don’t understand. It was a combination of incredulous to moral condemnation. There was just a bizarreness. And, you know, so maybe if there was a juxtaposition, but that’s Donniel the rabbi making now a sermon. So I’m gonna leave the sermon of Hanukkah aside. It was so, seeing some of the other enemies that we’re confronting, the multi-front dimension of this war is something that I’ve experienced. 

I see the onslaught. It’s not just Hamas’s onslaught, and it’s not just the fear imposed by Hamas and the instability. But just to see three cultural, intellectual giant figures incapable of answering a question, does genocide against Jews violate university code of speech? 

I know there’s a lot of Israelis who also listen to this podcast. There’s a war going on multiple fronts, which it pays for us to be aware of. I think that’s going to shape some of our conversation today. Today our theme is Gazan civilians. 

And the experience of somebody who is engaged in fighting this war in Israel is that there is no conversation about Gazan civilians. Not about casualties, not about what’s happening, not what they’re experiencing, nor about our moral responsibility to them. 

Here in North America, every lecture I get, at least one of the questions pertains to Gazan civilians. And while this is a moment of profound unity in the Jewish world, people standing together, our emotional experiences, and our moral discussion is not parallel. There are differences and they’re emerging. 

Today I want us to understand what’s going on. Just let’s try to first understand Israel, before we try to analyze what is the North American experience. Why, in Israel, are 15,000 civilian deaths, and let’s discount 7,000 as being Hamas terrorists, but still, this is just not even a conversation. How do you understand it, Yossi?

Yossi: I got a glimpse of this, of an answer. The other day I was on a panel with two other Israeli writers. It was sponsored by PEN, the International Writers Organization, it was a panel in Tel Aviv. And the other two writers were quite left-wing. And there was unanimity among the three of us that we need to fight this war to the end. 

And one of them, afterwards, said to me privately, said, you know, I’m in such a state of rage that I have to just remind myself that terrible things are happening on the other side. And he said, if that’s what I’m going through, can you imagine what’s happening to people who don’t have my politics? 

So the ground of this is a level of rage, Doniel, that I don’t think you and I have ever seen in this country and that’s taken everyone, in some sense, taken people over.

Donniel: It consumes, it’s a rage which consumes. It doesn’t just consume your heart, it consumes your vision. It consumes everything about you.

Yossi: Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah. And so that’s on the emotional level. On the, let’s say more on the conceptual level, this is something we’ve talked about before, but I want to reframe it in the context of your question, which is how Israelis perceive the justness of this war. And not just the justness of it, but the existential necessity of the war.

Now, if Israel doesn’t dislodge Hamas, we’re not going to fall apart. We’re not going to be destroyed. But there’s a sense that if we fail to remove this genocidal regime from our border, our credibility, our deterrent credibility, is going to begin to unravel, and our long-term prospects for surviving as a Jewish state in this region are going to be put under question. 

So it’s this combination of rage and deep conviction that this is not just a just war but an existential necessity. I think that that’s a really powerful, and also problematic combination because it is leading to a certain obtuseness. And I feel it too, Donniel. It’s happening to me too.

Donniel: So, there’s no room. There’s just no room. There’s no room.

For me, what I see primarily in Israel is not rage, even though I think the first few days was clearly rage and revenge. It was clearly rage and revenge. But over time, I don’t sense rage as a dominant feeling. I sense fear and self-righteousness of this war as the cocktail shaping the Israeli consciousness. 

And when you’re frightened, your primary Darwinian instinct is to focus on yourself. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You have to decide, are you going to fight or you’re going to flight? By nature, when you’re frightened, we’re not wired as human beings, at the moment of fear, to start thinking about anybody else. All you’re doing is thinking about yourself. 

And that’s coupled with the clear sentiment that this is a just war, that we are on the right. And in many ways, our righteousness comes from the fear and from the fact that we were attacked and nothing, nothing that taints that self-righteousness. Self-righteousness not in a negative sense. Self-righteousness in a very affirming sense is allowed to even enter into the conversation. And what I find remarkable is how, now in week nine, in the press, maybe in some of the printed press, but in the major websites, you don’t see any discussion. N

ow there’s a new site which is beginning to count Israeli wounded, not as only Israeli dead. We’re counting, we’re counting Israeli soldiers who were killed and Israeli soldiers who were wounded and we’re distinguishing between the numbers who were killed during the days in which we were trying to free the towns and Kibbutzim in the Gazan envelope between those who were wounded and killed in Gaza. We’re counting hostages. We’re counting numbers. We’re counting. 

There’s one group that we’re not counting. We’re not counting anything regarding Gazan civilians. And in a moment, I’m beginning to shift on this. You say you’re still there.

Yossi: Yeah, I’m still there.

Donniel: I’m not still there. For me, there’s a very big difference between the first stage of the war, before the ceasefire, and the second stage of the war. Already by the second stage, 

Yossi: Why? What do you think it is?

Donniel: Some of the fear, and certainly the rage has subsided. I’m not a rage guy in general. I don’t, I don’t allow.

Yossi: I can do rage pretty well. Especially Jewish rage. I’m pretty good at Jewish rage. 

Donniel: You do rage pretty well. I’m not a Jewish rage guy. I’m really not. I’m not a Jewish rage person. Revenge—these are, they’re necessary. There’s a difference between anger, and fear, you can’t really control. 

Self-righteousness, it’s something that I embrace. But by the second stage of the war, and as time is passing, I think the first stage, maybe I would say it this way, there was no oxygen. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe and so there was no room to talk. I have oxygen now. You know, some people, I met some friends who said, Donniel, your voice is coming back, you know, the tone in your voice is not the same. I have more oxygen and I have more time to ask, what is it that I care about and think about? 

So I’m beginning to shift as I think strategically about this war and tomorrow, and there’s more room in my consciousness, but you’re right, Israelis still aren’t there.

Yossi: It’s interesting, you and I spoke about rage and fear, and neither of us mentioned vengeance. And the perception abroad is that Israelis are motivated mostly by vengeance in this war. And I don’t think it’s true, and I’m hearing you say the same. 

I would make a distinction, a moral distinction between rage and vengeance. I am very much in a state of rage. Vengeance is a foreign emotion to me. And at the beginning, and you’re right, in the first days there was a very strong expression of the need for vengeance here, and it’s gradually faded away. 

But I would like to suggest another element here. And when you mention about how you felt that you couldn’t breathe those first days, where I feel deprived of oxygen is when I’m exposed to how Israel is being judged around the world. And we had a conversation in our last podcast about genocide. And I think that these wild accusations against Israel are contributing to an inability, a defensiveness among Israelis, I feel it, where you’re accusing us of genocide and then you expect me to examine my conscience and how I’m fighting a war of survival?

And so the more that Israel is unjustly accused and put in the dock, the less able we are to have that necessary moral conversation.

Donniel: You know, we’re such different people. We’re such close friends, but we are so wired differently. I never let somebody else’s judgment of me impact anything about what I do or how I want to conduct my life. It’s like I look at them and I say, a plague on all your houses.

But that I should allow, I look at those three presidents and I said, literally a plague on you. Like just, you know, one, Penn resigned, you should just disappear for your moral stain and failure. But so much of my life is an attempt and I feel this is so critical to what Israel must be, is an attempt to ask ourselves, who do we wanna be? 

And who we wanna be is our taking control. That’s what Zionism is about, our being the masters of our universe or the masters of our destiny. And part of that discussion is being a master of our moral responsibilities. And I’m looking at the silence in Israel around Palestinian suffering and death. And I’m saying Israel, it’s time to find the oxygen. 

The soldiers who were fighting, you’re right, after a few days, by the way, rage and vengeance could be very deeply connected, and we have to be very frightened from your rage and maybe that’s one of the reasons why I don’t like it, so I try to control it. 

But soldiers, it’s more a righteousness of the cause and the just of this war that’s motivating. It’s not, let me go kill. It’s not, I want to kill Hamas. That’s not, it’s not the story. It’s a story of, and you hear it at every funeral. This is a just war in defense of our people. But I think it’s time for us. I think nine weeks now, it’s too long. There’s major suffering going on and I want to make a distinction between how we fight the war and how we’re concerned for civilian casualties, because they’re not the same. 

I don’t believe that Israel, and neither do you, and nobody in Israel believes, that Israel’s targeting civilians. It’s not in our ethos. We know our army. We know our soldiers. That’s not what we do. We don’t target civilians. What we are doing is we’re pursuing a just war despite the consequences to civilians.

And as we’ve discussed many times, the presence of civilians cannot make conducting a just war impossible. And certainly civilian casualties does not make conducting a just war unjust. It can’t. This is the nature of Gaza. This is, you know, when we go back to our Shifa, this is just the nature of Gaza. And we know there’s going to be civilian casualties. 

And I don’t want to micromanage each bomb, why it was or why it was necessary and maybe it even needs to be done, but I have no ability to do so. Why was it necessary? Is it in support of the troops? Was it an attempt to hit a tunnel? I know there aren’t 10,000 command and control centers of Gaza, of Hamas and Gaza. So, but there, I’m hoping that there were purposes and I’m willing to assume that there was.

But there’s a difference between conducting the war and Israel’s concern for the consequences of that war. 

Yossi: Yeah, I mean, look, Donniel, there are different layers to this. The first is what you mentioned earlier, which is a major difference between how Israelis are experiencing this war and how many diaspora Jews are experiencing it, which is we know the army, we trust the army. And I understand people who don’t know the army intimately have more pressing questions than we do. 

You made a statement which you took for granted and I take for granted, and most Israelis do. We are not targeting civilians. But you have to slow that statement down because that is by no means a given outside of Israel. And I just want to acknowledge that. I wanna honor that statement because that’s the ground from which we’re conducting our critique of this war. And we don’t necessarily share that same premise with many of our critics. 

Donniel: That’s true, but this comes now to the distinction that I’m making, and I really appreciate you making it. Because the issue here of Gazan civilians is not just Gazan deaths as a result of the military operation. There are two million people now who are homeless, there’s wounded. If there is no justification for us to ignore the humanitarian crisis. For the humanitarian crisis to be an American agenda is I believe a moral flaw in the way Israel is conducting this war. 

Not the casualties. We have to do what we have to do. As you said, we’re gonna assume, and it could be we were wrong, but there’s consequences of what we’re doing. And we are ignoring it. And it’s the Americans who have to say to us, no, humanitarian crisis—that’s your agenda, that’s not my agenda as a Jew?

There’s no reason in the world why Israel, who is capable, uniquely capable, of setting up field hospitals in any corner of the world within 24-48 hours, capable of trauma surgery, complex trauma surgery, in areas of devastation without water and electricity, how right on a part of the border, right on Israel’s side, shouldn’t set up three-four hospitals, and begin to start treating casualties, whether we were justified or not. 

I think that whether it’s rage or fear or the justice of the war, is, cannot make us immune to the claims of justice. And justice applies also to Gazans. 

Now, I’m not talking about how we fight. There is a humanitarian crisis that I believe Israel has to start taking a lead on. And I think our failure to do so, not just the fact that they don’t know our army, Yossi, but the failure to do so, is making some of our friends question, and where is your morality? What is your second moral value after self-defense?

Yossi: Right, that’s a really good way to put it. I wouldn’t frame it in the language of justice, which is so loaded and politicized these days. I think we have our own language, which is “Adam nivrah b’tselem,” a human being is created in the image of God, and we have a responsibility to protect vulnerable human beings, especially human beings who’ve been made vulnerable by our actions, however necessary and unavoidable they are. So I’m with you on that. 

How that would actually play out, it’s an intriguing idea, Donniel, and I think it says something about where Israelis are at, is that you’re the first person that I’ve heard even mention the idea. There’s no conversation on the left here about that. It’s in, sometimes when I speak to people on the left, I feel an even greater rage coming from them, this deep sense of betrayal that they feel. 

And despair, it reminds me of the first days into the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, the wave of suicide bombings, when one left-wing activist after another appeared in the media in this public confession, repudiating all of the hopes that they had as being naive and self-defeating, there’s something happening there again. And so when you come up with really a beautiful idea, an idea that should be self-evident to Israelis, who’s going to take it up? Who has the emotional strength right now to do that in Israeli society?

Donniel: I think it’s time. You know, and our job is, we’re educators, it’s our job to talk. It’s our job to put forth ideas. And very often these ideas get caught. You know, this is the war cabinet. I’m not expecting the cabinet, a Smotrich-Ben Gvir cabinet to pass this. But a Benny Gantz should start talking about it. An Eisenkot should start talking about it. I think it’s time for us to be so self-consumed. It’s not the only thing that’s happening. 

And in many ways, I didn’t learn it from America, but it’s so interesting how here in North America, as I said, every audience is talking about it. And there’s two reasons they’re talking about it. The first is the nature of being six to ten thousand miles away means that your rage and fear are different. North American Jews are feeling rage and fear at a newfound anti-Semitism that they’re experiencing or that they’re witnessing. Whether it’s existential or not, doesn’t matter. It’s there. It’s consuming North American Jewish discourse right now. 

What has changed in our life and what has not changed? And at some point in the future, we’re going to have to talk about that too. But the nature of distance is that you’re not as consumed by that rage.

The second thing is that in Israel, we live in our own emotional, moral bubble where we are really in the biggest Jewish ghetto in the world, in Jewish history. North American Jews, part of their vulnerability is hearing how people are talking about the war. So in Israel when we hear it we shut them down. You know we barely even notice or we just call them anti-Semites and go on with our business. 

North American Jews are a minority in the midst of a community who forget the crazy, progressive left, the extreme progressive left. There are people who are asking serious questions and they don’t know the answers. 

And you know who’s asking the most questions, Yossi? You know what’s affecting them the most? Their children. Their children are asking these questions and they’re coming up and saying, I don’t have an answer. And in Israel, which is completely oblivious to this conversation, is an Israel that they feel more challenged to defend.

Yossi: And our children here are angriest of all.

Donniel: That’s unbelievable. We have to stop on that, Yossi. It’s like, talk about that. It’s true.

Yossi: I think that this, that October 7th is the formative event of this generation, this emerging generation. Our generation, Donniel, was shaped by the hopes of peace and by the disappointments. We went through a roller coaster. Our kids, it’s a one-dimensional assault. And I worry about that. I worry about how this will shape us politically, emotionally, spiritually. Our children are a profoundly wounded generation. And it happened literally in one day. They went from being, I would say, in some ways the most well-adjusted Jews in history to the most traumatized. And we haven’t begun unpacking.

Donniel: Nine weeks, Yossi, and a generation is now traumatized. This is For Heaven’s Sake — Israel at War — Day 65. You can now sponsor an episode of For Heaven’s Sake — Israel at War. The link to donate can be found in the show notes or shalomhartman.org/forheavenssake. We will acknowledge your gift in a future episode. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes or visit shalomhartman.org/israelatwar.