The following is a transcript of Episode 83 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hello, my friends. This is Daniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi coming to you from Jerusalem at a very hard time. And as a result, we decided to change the format of For Heaven’s Sake.

For the next number of weeks, For Heaven’s Sake is going to be with the subtitle of Israel at War. And every two or three days, we’re going to come and talk. Talk about what’s happening in Israel. Talk about what we’re feeling. I know for many of you, it’s really, really hard to be 6, 10, 15 thousand miles away. You love Israel. You care about Israel. And living in Israel has its own hardships, and loving Israel from afar has its own as well. 

And we hope that this podcast and its episodes will provide for you a way of understanding, a way of connecting, and a way of feeling. And let’s dive straight in, Yossi.

This is one of the hardest times that I’ve experienced here in Israel. I’m not saying it’s one of the hardest times in the history of the Jewish people, but it’s been a very, very hard time. And I look forward to being with you and with our audience to also figure out and to make sense of my thoughts and my feelings.

And so much has happened since a few days ago. What’s your primary feeling, Yossi?

Yossi: You know, before I talk about the situation, I just want to say how grateful I feel to our audience that they’ve been with us through all of the vagaries of the last few years and what a rollercoaster it’s been. And the letters that we get from people and the expressions of appreciation.

I just want to reciprocate that at a time like this, to know that we have thousands of people who really are friends and family to us at this point. And how much it means when you sit here and you feel the walls closing in. And so I just really want to say thank you to everyone.

Donniel: Is that your primary feeling, the walls closing in? 

Yossi: The walls closing in, the floor opening under my feet, the ceiling blown open, total, total insecurity, a feeling that anything can happen at any time from any direction. What we considered until a few days ago as reasonably solid has been exposed as a facade. And so, the first feeling I think, that so many of us are experiencing is radical disorientation.

Donniel: It’s interesting, my primary feeling right now is sadness. I’m connecting very, very deeply with the pain. Not the larger, military, geopolitical significance. I don’t do Facebook. So I’m not subject to the horrific images and the unfathomable, really, images. 

But just listening to the human stories and understanding what people went through. Their pain is haunting me, and, on a very human level, I think, you know, in Israel, very often, we protect ourselves by not allowing ourselves to feel too much, because if you feel too much, you don’t know where it’s going to end. Just the numbers, the amount of people whose lives have been changed. You know, I don’t know, maybe it resonates a little bit back to my, to the story of my family and my sister. 

Yossi: Of losing a loved one.

Donniel: A loved one, but maybe like for me, one of the important parts of a people and of a family, for me, loyalty is the essence, I guess. It’s the glue. It is the core of what constitutes a community. Loyalty to each other. And now, the loyalty to, to hear them, and to feel their pain. And it’s a very powerful part of what I’m feeling right now. 

Yossi: It’s interesting, I am on social media, I, especially Twitter, X, and I have been exposed to these horrific clips and I look at them and I turn away and I put my mind back on the national situation. It’s too much to think about the personal suffering and the dimensions of the suffering.

So, I do have a tendency to try to shield myself by going into the national story.

Donniel: Because you overexpose.

Yossi: Maybe that, and, and that’s just the way my, my brain thinks. But there’s no refuge now in the national. The national is as broken as the most heartbreaking stories. And I’m trying to understand what has this done to us?

I can’t think ahead. I haven’t been able to. And usually, I, that’s, that’s the next level of abstract protection, is that you think, okay, let’s think policy, let’s, I can’t, I can’t go there. I am trying to understand where are we at this moment, as a nation, as a people, and the grief, the overwhelming grief that I’m feeling is for the Jewish people.

Donniel: By the way, that’s the way we’re going to conduct our conversation. We’re, this is going to be in small little pieces. Cause we don’t know. We’re trying to figure out what we feel, we’re trying to figure out what our country needs to do and how it heals and where our future is, so it’s all going to be in these small little shorter pieces.

But one of the questions that haunts Israelis and every single person who I meet asks me this question, whether they actually, you know, sometimes people ask a question which you’re not supposed to answer, they don’t want an answer. It’s not about answering it. It’s about this, how did this happen?

Yossi: That what I would call an Israeli question.

Donniel: But by the way, North American Jews, I’m hearing it. How could this have happened?

How do you understand, maybe connecting to your feelings, how do you understand the question, even? Forget the answer. If you have an answer, please share it, but where does that question meet you?

Yossi: Of all of the questions related to the army, first of all, that’s, I think, what the question is about. Where’s Tzahal? Where’s the IDF? For me, the most unthinkable of all of the army’s failures, intelligence failures, we understand. We, it’s human, it can happen, there’s a “קונספציה,” a concept, the concept was that Hamas would never attack us, they’re too weak, they’re dependent on Qatari money which we’re funneling, all, all of that.

The question, and I think this touches on what you were saying earlier, Donniel, the question of solidarity. Where this hits me most deeply is that it took the army eight or ten hours to get to the besieged towns in Kibbutzim. People were calling and we were listening to these phone calls on, I heard it on social media, calling desperately from their sealed rooms. There was a woman whispering, “יש מחבלים פה,” there are terrorists here. It was actually live on TV. Everyone heard this. The army heard it. The police heard it. There were individual Israelis who drove down, civilians, drove down to rescue their loved ones, their friends, and did it. Heroes. They went down and the army is, is where exactly? Is sitting in Judea and Samaria?

And that is apparently where the army was. That’s why there was almost no one at the border. They were transferred. That at least is what I’m hearing now. They were transferred.

Donniel: Justifiably.

Yossi: Eh, there’s going to be a big, big question about that.

Donniel: I know, but the…

Yossi: But let’s, let’s leave that aside

Donniel: We’re going to leave that one. 

Yossi: Right. So the question here really is how long does it take to get from the West Bank to the Gaza border? How long does it take to organize? Two hours. It doesn’t take ten hours. What happened? And this, there wasn’t this sense of burning urgency? I have to leave everything, just go.

Donniel: Oh, that’s interesting. I don’t question the sense of burning urgency. I don’t. And I know that in certain areas they came very quickly. I just think the magnitude was such that we were just not capable. You know, I have a whole,

Yossi: Think about what you’ve just said. 

Donniel: I know, I

Yossi: Think of that.

Donniel: I know, and I want to even take it further. So much of what we do here in Israel, in order to get up in the morning, in order to live semi-normal lives in a crazy neighborhood, is we build, like most people, but we do it even more, these myths of stability. And to do so, we almost have to portray and tell stories and to elevate our army to a mythic level. These are the superheroes of history.

Now, every human institution, we as human beings, are flawed. You know, you served in the army. I served in the army. I went to war. I saw the perpetual, colossal, ongoing mistakes happening every time the army works. And you know when we don’t have it? When we are pinpointing, with a small segment of elite troops who prepare for days for a particular operation in Jenin.

Yossi: Right. 

Donniel: You know, and I wonder whether the question of how, is itself, what do you mean how? How? Our communications were taken down.

Yossi: How?

Donniel: By a drone, by a fakakta, by a fakakta drone, by low-level technology, by the fact that Hamas are not as stupid as we like to say that they are, and that maybe they’re far more significant and they’re not dumb and incompetent.

And at the end of the day, when there’s a confluence of errors, by the way, which seems to happen all the time with human beings, welcome to the human race. I know you don’t, we don’t want it. We don’t want to know that there’s medical mistakes, and we don’t want to know that people, they don’t know the scope, the volume, the lack of information, the thousand people, where to start, I think, I’m not explaining, I’m almost saying, Yossi,

Yossi: What you’re feeling.

Donniel: I’m saying that, you know, why do I want to blame the army for a myth that they were never able to really live up to in the first place? Nobody could give us, the status quo in Gaza was unsustainable. When you have 40, 50,000 people, training day in and day out, to kill you and amassing the means to do so. And you did not want to go in because you yourself wanted a myth that you could do this without casualties. And so all we would ever do is bomb from the air.

And then, this קונספציה, you know, we wanted it. And then, we were being disingenuous, and then we’re turning around and saying, the army, how could it be that you’re never going to be flawed? I needed you to be perfect. I needed you to be more than that. And maybe, because I could see, we’re going to set up these commissions, and we’re going to find out who was flawed. At the end of the day. There’s always going to be a moment when different events all come together, skill and luck are going to be against you. And so, I don’t, I just sort of wonder, not how did this happen, how does it not happen more often?

Yossi: Donniel, yes, I agree with you that in the army what one sees is how small the margin of error is, the distance between success and failure, all the time. But if we’re still on the level of emotions, ahem, everything in me cries out against your generosity of spirit. And I appreciate your generosity of spirit. 

In this case, it’s too much.

Donniel: I know. I hear you.

Yossi: And there are פַשְׁלוֹת, there are mistakes, and there are mistakes.

Donniel: I know, but you know why I also want to hold on to this, Yossi? Because I know what’s coming. And I know we’re gonna sit here, and we need to have this omnipotent military who’s going to provide for us some superhuman victory

Yossi: Or competent. Donniel, never mind superhuman. Competent. Competent. 

Donniel: I know, but the competency, there is sometimes a breakdown. There is a breakdown. And when all of the command and control are killed, and all the communications are down. And nobody ever thought that more than ten people were going to come through. That was as big as they thought. And then they first heard that it was a hundred and two hundred, and all of a sudden there’s over a thousand, and we don’t have the intelligence. At the end of the day, I think, and this is what I want to say today. 

I am mourning today. I’m mourning for people’s pain. For all of our pain. My family, your family, all of us. I have no vengeance in my heart and I have no anger. I just know that our life here in Israel is constantly this close to failure. And that as a people it pays for us to remember that. Not to explain and justify merely what happened over the last few days, but to be aware of it in the days to come.

Yossi: See where I’ve been trying to control my outrage is toward the government. And in my mind, there’s a kind of a convergence between the unspeakable ways in which Netanyahu has brought this country over the last year to this moment. For me, this is the culminating moment of everything he’s done to us with the army’s failure.

And I’m trying to separate that, trying to look at it, and I’m trying very much to tell myself whatever reckoning there needs to be, and there certainly needs to be a deep reckoning with this government, has to come at the end and not now. 

You know, I read Israeli social media and the vehemence, I read it and I so understand it, this sense of, how could you have done this to us? And at the same time, I want to tell them, not now. Save your vehemence, directed outward. Because we’re going to really be needing that sense of emotional fortifying in the weeks and I suspect months to come.

I think this is just the beginning of a very long war. 

Donniel: Sadness, outrage, just two of the feelings that are permeating our society, together with an awareness that we are on the verge of an unknown. This is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War. See you in two days as we continue to look at and unpack where we are, what we feel, where we’re going, and where we ought to go. Yossi.

Donniel: Thank you, Daniel. I needed that.

Yossi: Thank you, Yossi.