The following is a transcript of Episode 100 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 edition, Israel at War. And today is day 61. And our theme for today is a theme that is in many ways incomprehensible to me. A theme that I could have never imagined I would have to talk about.

The theme is genocide, the accusation which is prevalent in certain circles, that the Jewish people and the state of Israel in particular, are committing genocide in Gaza.

Now, just on a technical level, the term, as it’s defined in the United Nations Convention, is a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part.

Yossi, where does this accusation, which highly educated, highly morally committed individuals are hurling against us, where does it meet you? How do you even make sense of this?

Yossi: Before I even try to make sense of it, where it hits me emotionally, is that it’s tearing open the already open wounds of October 7th.

There’s something about how Israel is being perceived that compounds the nightmare of October 7th. What we experienced in the massacre was a pre-enactment of Hamas’s genocidal vision for the Jews of Israel. And I believe that it was intended to be that.

And then to find yourself accused of genocide after undergoing a kind of a mini-genocidal experience is so profoundly disorienting that I don’t know what world I’m living in anymore. I feel like I can’t take the most basic solidity of this reality for granted.

It’s so outrageous that, you know, you can critique Israel, you can say that we’re not careful enough with civilian casualties. There’s room for that conversation. It’s an important conversation. But from there to go to genocide, this is something that I really did not see coming on October 8th.

Donniel: You know, you’re connecting it, Yossi, to Hamas, emotionally, as if this is the second stage of a profound attempt to destroy us. 

Yossi: Exactly. Absolutely.

Donniel: One was an attempt to kill us, and the other one is to attempt to stain us morally beyond redemption. 

Yossi: To erase our story.

Donniel: I wanna come back to that. To erase our story.

Me emotionally, I am baffled. So much of my life is based on the assumption of human decency and of the fact that I live in a cultured universe. And I have, I’m very, very privileged. I assume culture, I assume goodness, I assume honesty, I assume integrity. 

Now, I’m not so naive and I go to war when I encounter danger, but this verbal attack, it’s easy for me to fall into, okay, it’s antisemitic, but that, I don’t want to use that term, and part of it is because I just don’t, haven’t lived my life in a world in which antisemitism is an integral part of what I experience from the non-Jewish world. 

And I have lived a privileged life growing up in Canada, United States, Israel. And I’m sure that Jews in other parts of the world and in other decades and other sensibilities, or who were raised more like you have that sensibility. 

But I don’t. And when I see this, I don’t use antisemitism as an explanation because it’s not so much in my arsenal and it’s possible that I have to start rethinking that. But there’s such a sense of bafflement that the war in Gaza, again, horrific, clearly a war which falls under the categories of a just war. Clearly. And to not just attack it, but to associate what we are doing with complete disregard to what in fact is happening on the ground, as horrific as it is, and to use the genocide term, which once you are accused of genocide, you are now a Nazi.

Yossi: Oh, exactly. That’s the purpose of the accusation. That’s right.

Donniel: When you’re accused of genocide, you are the worst of the universe, and your right to be is removed. So that sense of there’s a bewilderment. There’s pain, but there’s a bewilderment. 

Now, so let’s try to go if you to go beyond the bewilderment. How could it? How could this be? This is not, you know, if it was just in the hands of, if Hamas called me genocidal, I’d understand. If radical Islamic terrorist organizations around the world called me genocidal, okay, it’s another missile, you know, you’re willing to fire, the Houthis are willing to fire cruise missiles, so this is another missile to attack Israel. But this is being lobbed at the heart of culture.

Mindful, thoughtful people, many people who have good friends who are Jews, some of their best friends, many of them are even Jews. So I think we need some nuance or some tools to understand this. And I’m hoping you’re going to help me, Yossi. So please.

Yossi: There’s been an escalation of accusations against Israel that are aimed at turning it into a criminal state. 

So when I was at university in the 1970s, the accusation began that Israel is colonialist. It was the tail end of decolonization and that was a living affront, a living moral affront. In our time Israel has been accused of being an apartheid state. That’s already the next step in this progression. Now, the last stop is to be a genocidal state. 

And as you put it, Donniel, that’s calling us Nazi. And the most immediate purpose of accusing Israel of genocide is to erase the genocidal moment of October 7. It’s as if it didn’t happen. Or if it did happen, we deserved it in the same way that, you know, one can look at the devastation of Nazi Germany, Berlin, 1945, and you say, well, they brought it on themselves. 

But there’s also an element here that there’s another outrage that I would like to connect it to, which is the mass phenomenon of tearing down the posters of kidnapped Israelis. This is happening all over the West, especially on campuses. What does that mean? Why do they need to tear down posters of kidnapped children? 

Because the notion that Israel has any humanity opens up the possibility that maybe we have a case, maybe not all of justice is on the Palestinian side. And so in order to chant the slogan “From the river to the sea,” which itself is a genocidal slogan, you need to erase the humanity and the justness of the other side. Colonialism did that, apartheid did that, but nothing does that better than genocide. 

And to see pictures of kidnapped babies is a threat to that total worldview in which there can be no space for Israel’s legitimacy. That’s what this is about for me.

Donniel: Yossi, I wanna, I need you a little more. I need your help. I hear what you’re saying and to say that it’s disturbing is an understatement. Is this just another manifestation of antisemitism? Do you see? Is that? Because you’ve defined it, but just like antisemitism, you haven’t explained. I hear it. And I agree with your analysis, with each part of it. 

So what is this? What’s the motivation? Is this just a core evil anti-semitic impulse that is surfacing and entering into the mainstream? Is that the way you explain it?

Yossi: Look, certainly anti-Semitism is at play here, but I don’t think that that’s the whole story. This is an expression, the most potent expression of a mindset, and it’s not even a political mindset, it’s a cultural environment in which the West is evil. I’m speaking about the progressive world right now. And it’s an expression of self-hatred. 

You know, Donniel, when you and I protested in the streets over the last year against our government, vehement protests, we carried giant Israeli flags. When progressives demonstrate against the American government or other places in the West, they don’t carry the national flag. There is a self-revulsion at work in much of progressive culture. And Israel is the most potent expression of what young people hate about their own societies. We’ve become we’ve become an embodiment of that. 

And so yes, of course there’s hatred of Jews that’s being expressed, but I see this as a as a deeper problem, a deeper problem for their own societies, because the future elite of America is growing up with a sense that the country was, when was it founded in 1619, right? With the first slaves coming to America. Original sin is not only part of the American story, it’s the totality of American history. 

And so if America is evil, well, we’re the little Satan, to quote Iran. America is the great Satan. And there’s something that we’re experiencing now, which is much bigger than hatred of Israel. And as someone who loves America and who believes that if the West goes down, there will be no civilizational replacement, I’m profoundly worried not only as a Jew, I’m worried about the future of this planet.

Donniel: I hear you, Yossi, and some of it I feel is our larger cultural moves that are beyond me. They’re not my natural area of comfort or I feel of knowledge or expertise. But I appreciate that we have to take them into account because when you think that you’re this unique phenomenon, that it’s only you, and you’re not seeing other discourse which is associated with it, then that itself could be an ego trip beyond comprehension. We’re the center of the universe always. 

But there is a dimension which I’ve been thinking about. You know, superpowers get away with whatever they could get away with. One of the advantages of being a superpower, being one of the countries in the United Nations, which have a right to veto, what does the veto mean? It means that you have a right to determine the world standards. 

You decide. You could decide, is this acceptable or unacceptable? In many ways, it’s you’re immune. The veto power, I’m sure, was initiated in order to ensure some level of peaceful coexistence and to demand cooperation. But de facto, what it has evolved into is that certain groups could do whatever they want to do and they’re never sanctioned, never. 

To not be sanctioned means that I own moral discourse. I own the moral standards. I am the judge and the arbiter. I’m not the protector of my own country. I am the determiner of the standard for the world. So Russia, China, the United States go to war. There isn’t even a sense of coherence to attack them. 

So you’re speaking about a self-hatred, which is there, but I don’t see the level of attack against America and self-hatred to the same degree, even though it’s there, but I feel this is more widespread than a much more fringe group who wants to delegitimize America. 

You know, I watch, because you know I watch 14 news sites, and so you see always some little student getting up and saying, you know, usually in the title of their organization, there usually is the word socialist somewhere along the line. And yes, America is evil and everything is evil and they’re living in America and they’re going to work in America and shopping in America. So there’s something slightly different. 

Yossi: So what do you think is going on here? What’s your sense?

Donniel: So I’m wondering whether we live on an edge in which we are powerful, we’re not a superpower, but we dare to use our power and to associate it with moral righteousness. Zionism from the beginning had to fight for its existence.

Power is intimately connected to the Zionist story. Even ideologically, we Jews who said we want to come back, we want to come back to power. Part of the normalcy is we don’t want to be victims anymore. And we saw powerlessness not as an expression of moral superiority, but as moral inadequacy that you could talk about human rights, but what about your own? 

And we dare to speak about our own right to be, not as a self-interest, Zionism is about the Jewish people claiming power as our moral right, as a moral expression. For us in Israel, war is a liberal moral agenda. It’s a liberal moral agenda. 

And in that sense, we are the ultimate enemy. How dare you use liberal values? Not to avoid, not to elevate others, but how dare you use moral liberal language to justify power? 

Yossi: It’s a great insight, Donniel I like that very much. And there’s something, I would even take that one step further, which is that we are seen as the ultimate hypocrites. Because we speak the language of morality. And yet we behave, at least in the perception of our severe critics, in the opposite way. 

And here I do believe there is an anti-semitic root to this critique of Israel as hypocrites. And you hear that all the time. I see it on social media all the time. You hypocrites. You speak about the Holocaust and yet you’re doing the Holocaust to others. It’s not only that we speak in the name of morality, as you put it, but it’s also that we dare to see ourselves, at least historically, as victims. And so there’s something galling about a country that speaks in the name of liberal values and yet will go to war against a seemingly defenseless population. And there’s something galling about a people that will speak of itself as chosen and yet insist on acting like everyone else. 

And where the anti-Semitic roots here lie is in the Christian, the old Christian, critique of the Jew as Pharisee. And the very word Pharisee was taken, adapted by Christianity and transformed. In Jewish context, Pharisee is actually a very positive word. It’s the rabbis who created the Talmud. In Christian language, Pharisee is the hypocrite. Judas. And Israel is perceived consciously or not as a Pharisee nation, precisely for the reason that you said, and also because of this added dimension of, who do you think you are to talk about the Holocaust? 

And there’s something about October 7th that plays right into this. If we had remained the victims of October 7th, we would be celebrated in much of the world today. But we very quickly segued from October 7th to October 8th. We immediately lashed out at Gaza. We began heavy bombardment and then a ground offensive. And we refused to stay in that place of victimhood. And that’s something that I think some parts of the world refuse to forgive us for.

Donniel: I know that’s the paradox and I want to spend a moment on it because I think Israel does embody a paradox and I think sometimes we also harm ourselves. You know, we used to always want to say that we’re David, but as I’ve said somewhere in these podcasts, once David defeats Goliath, you’re not David anymore. You’re Goliath. And so the Jewish people, we’re not David. 

The David story of the hopeless Jew, we just, that, we have to shed it. Zionism was about overcoming that image. We don’t wanna be David anymore. I don’t want it. I don’t elevate it. I don’t glorify it. I frankly, I hate it. I hate it. I love the fact that I am now Goliath. I love the fact that I have the means to protect myself.

But what October 7th, and maybe this connects back to the pictures of the hostages, Israelis, October 7th didn’t make us David again. Didn’t make us powerless. Hamas harmed us. Hamas created a strategic necessity to go to war, a just war. But Israel’s strong. But at the same time, while we’re Goliath, doesn’t mean that we’re also not victims. To be a victim is not the same as being David. There’s a simplicity. You’re David, therefore you’re the victim.

That was the Jewish story for 2,000 years. You’re powerless, you’re the victim. And usually the victim is the powerless. Part of what is an essential or a core part of the paradox of Israel is that we are a superpower, but we’re also victims, not of Russia, not of the United States or China.

But the nature of asymmetrical war is that terrorists could turn a superpower into a victim. And we are a superpower without a veto. We don’t have the veto. We are being victimized and unapologetically, without a power of veto, small people in the world are getting up and declaring, my right to live is a liberal value. My right to fight is a liberal value.

 As someone who I had dinner with just a few nights ago said to me, we believe that war is not a war crime and we declare it and our society drafts, we carry our flag, we are proud of our nation, and we are fighting for that, and for some people, that is an intolerable picture, intolerable. That, to claim those two, is just impossible. And at the essence of Zionism is the need to claim those two, or I would yearn.

Listen, I yearn for the day that we won’t be victims anymore. I yearn for a day that there will be a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel, peace and security, that Gazans will be linked up with Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, and that they will flourish and have a leadership which will be, I don’t know if it could be by the people, but at least will be for the people. I yearn for them to have that. And I yearn for the day where I won’t be a victim. 

But right now, I’m a Goliath who’s still vulnerable. And there’s something about that complexity.

Yossi: Ah, but that’s an important distinction, Donniel. That’s an important distinction because we are not victims. The Israeli ethos despises victimhood, but we are very vulnerable. And October 7th showed us just how vulnerable we are. 

But I wanna bring this back for a moment to wanna connect it, because to what I was trying to get to earlier about the culture of the progressive world. And you helped me understand something here to fit a missing piece in, which is that we should have been by right, the ultimate victims, we should have been celebrated by the intersectional universe, we would have had pride of place. 

The only problem is we didn’t want to be there. Israel and Zionism denied us our place in the intersectional web, in the hierarchy of victimhood. We don’t want to be there. What we’re getting now from the progressive world is the pushback on the fact that we survived too well.

And that’s what Israel is about. And for that matter, that’s the success story of American Jewry. And the Jewish people after the Holocaust refused to embrace the identity of victim. And in that sense, we’re paying a price now. It’s a very high price, but certainly you and I would agree that the trade-off was worth it.

Donniel: So maybe, Yossi, that’s a little solace for those in Israel and for Jews around the world who feel this evil onslaught, friends of theirs, colleagues, organizations to which they belong, people who were our allies, the experience of loneliness by this accusation. And it’s important to remember that most of the world is not accusing us and we still have huge amounts of friends and governments and across, you know, the far progressive left is not the majority of the universe and it pays for us to remember that. 

But maybe some comfort that we should find in this is that with all the pain and the loneliness that some of us are experiencing as we’re alienated from groups, who are our deep allies, and who we supported, is that this is who we want to be. 

We want to be a people who sees our right to defend ourselves as an inherent expression of what it means to be a liberal in the modern world. And in that, we’ll find, you know, that’s not a victory, but maybe there is some solace as I look them into the eyes and I say, I understand you, but I’m not walking with you.

Yossi, this is our hundredth podcast.

Yossi: Amazing, right, Donniel? How did we get to 100?

Donniel: I don’t know, most of them were with our colleague Elana, who I hope will shortly rejoin us when God willing the war begins to, I don’t know what you do with wars, but quiet down. And we could talk about, not just about war. 

But I just wanna tell you that walking with you, these hundred episodes, has been one of the most meaningful experiences and learning experiences in my life. And as I travel now around North America and just being able to reach out to tens and hundreds of thousands of people and to be with you and to talk with them and to hopefully give you our audience some strength, some comfort, some understanding, some insights. Walking with you, being with you is also an unbelievably meaningful and important part of what my life has become. And Yossi, I want to give you a chance to say a closing word.

Yossi: I just want to say that what I’ve learned in this experience is the full meaning of what it means to have a real chavruta, a real study partner. A study partner is at once a friend and a teacher. And that’s what you are for me, Doniel. So, thank you.

Donniel: I love you, and to our audience, thank you so much for listening. And as long as you’re there, we’ll try to be here. And hopefully better days are around the corner. 

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