The following is a transcript of Episode 85 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, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute with Yossi Klein Halevi, our senior research fellow. And this is For Heaven’s Sake—Israel at War, a podcast from the Shalom Hartman Institute. This is day nine, and our theme for today is moral red lines. 

But before we get into that, Yossi, nine days, 10 days, our audience will hear this one. Where are you right now?

Yossi: You know, you could have said, this is day three, this is day 30, and it’s somehow all the same. I am, you lose track of time. Aside from eating and sleeping, I’m doing okay. Not doing so well in the eating and sleeping department. But, you know, I think that you and I share something in common, Donniel. We both, we both rely on our work to get us through, and we’re able to cope by feeling that we’re being productive. And so as long as I keep writing, I feel like I’m getting through the day. How about you?

Donniel: I find myself in two very different places. We’re a strong people and we get back to some form, semblance of normalcy pretty quickly. And the chaos which overtook all of us and the deep emotions that took over, which really engulfed us after the massacres.

We’re now, I feel like we’re in war mode. Like we now had a, we’re in functioning mode. And so I’m in functioning mode. But at the same time, I find myself every three minutes checking to see, did Hezbollah shoot? And did we go in yet? So we’re going to be within the next 12, 24 hours in another mode, as our troops move in. 

And so it’s both, I find myself adjusting to the new normal, but at the back of my consciousness, knowing that this normal’s just about come to an end, and we’re gonna have to find a way to adjust again as new levels of difficulty and tragedy.

You know, I met a neighbor just on Shabbat. He was sitting at a bus stop. He’s the one who introduced my wife, Adina, and I. And so I know this man for, what is it, 50 something years. And I asked him how he’s doing and he looked okay. He has 13 grandchildren in Gaza. 13 grandchildren are about to go into Gaza. 

You know, so we’re okay and not okay. It’s like you just go back and forth, you know?

Yossi: Yeah, when you talk about the two modes, I think that that’s true for the whole society in a slightly different way than you were indicating. On the one hand, we really do know how to instantly switch into emergency normal. And on the other hand, the enormity of what happened last week is just sinking in. After the first shock, people, I think, are realizing that what we’ve lived through is something that’s going to change Israel permanently. It’s going to change all of us permanently.

Donniel: You know, Yossi, it’s a good segue to the theme that we wanted to talk about today. It’s moral red lines. You know, we could have a conversation about morality of war and theory and talk philosophically, and maybe we’ll do a little of that. What is international law and what makes moral sense?

And as we talk in theory, as you engage in a war and distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. But we’re coming at this from this, from experiencing this horrific pogrom and all the stories. And we’re coming to this wounded. And when you come from a place of wound and tragedy, your discourse around moral red lines is very different. It’s not a theoretical one. 

There isn’t a lot of conversation going on in Israel about moral red lines right now. In Israel, there’s a discrepancy between Israel and A, so, I want to get to that. But I want to start with my friend Yossi. Where are you?

Yossi: So, the shift that I’ve made, and I do think that this is true for almost the entire country, is the decision that this time Hamas will not be granted immunity. They will not be allowed to hide behind the innocent. 

Now, first of all, we obviously need to try to make sure that as many of the innocent in Gaza have enough time to leave. So that’s something that’s a given for me. But this whole question, Donniel, of not granting Hamas immunity is infinitely more complicated emotionally this time, because it’s not only not granting them immunity behind their own civilians, it’s also behind our civilians. 

This is the first time that Hamas has a critical mass of Israeli hostages. And the consequence of going full force against Hamas is basically a death sentence on our hostages. And I keep thinking about this elderly survivor, elderly survivor who has two grandchildren in Gaza.

And I have to metaphorically look her in the eye and say, I’m ready to go all the way and risk the lives of your grandchildren. That’s where this is hitting me. It’s hitting me in the place of what are the consequences in the most immediate way of not granting Hamas immunity.

Donniel: I hear you. If it’s okay with you, I want to keep on our joint table the statement regarding the Israeli hostages. But I want to talk about that more in-depth and the consequences of that. But if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is I have to destroy Hamas, be what may be the consequences, whether it’s to Gazans or whether it’s to my own citizens. And so you don’t want to target. 

So how do you feel? Is red lines, is that something that you feel is something that gets in the way of attacking Hamas? And therefore, right now, you are frightened of red lines being used to grant Hamas immunity? Moral red lines, I mean.

Yossi: I’m frightened of two things. Once we’ve decided to destroy Hamas. I’m concerned about, and I see that as a moral imperative. I see that as a moral goal to destroy Hamas. I’m concerned about other moral red lines interfering. On the other hand, I’m desperately worried about us losing our minimal moral credibility in Gaza, and it’s so easy for that to happen. So I believe we must have a conversation on moral red lines, but inevitably something has shifted.

Donniel: You know, it’s impossible for it not to shift on a human level. It’s impossible. You know, we’re not theoretical philosophers or angels. We’re human beings. And it has nothing even to do with vengeance. It’s not vengeance. It’s the deep desire to implement your inalienable right to defend yourself.

And as we said the last time, the minute you see something as absolute evil, the measures that you have to take change and your ability to accommodate, your ability to rationalize, your ability to say, okay, I’m going to put pressure, this pressure, and then their self-interest will activate. It’s all gone. It’s all gone. 

And it is very, very hard as a normal human being to think about others’ moral rights when your consciousness is dominated by your moral right to live. And the recognition that allowing this to fester and grow is now in existential danger to us that we just can’t tolerate anymore. And so I understand that.

And I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine, a wonderful, wonderful woman who was calling me. She says, I have to speak to you. She’s in terrible angst. I need to talk to you, she said. And she was telling me of her brother who’s a very famous movie producer, documentaries of international fame, who was going into great detail about pictures and the videos that he saw, and saying, I have covered wars all over the world, in Bosnia and Ukraine. I’ve never seen, he said, anything like this.

And she was declaring that, Donniel, I want to kill all of them, this is her, I want to kill all of them, and this is a woman who doesn’t want it wouldn’t hurt a fly, I want to kill all of them. And she was reaching out to me because she needed to talk to me. She’s like, what do we do? And she’s, I want to kill all of them. How do I raise my children here? How do I raise my grandchildren here? 

And you know, she was talking and I was giving her advice and I was being, you know, and I want to, I don’t want to be the rabbi or the philosopher. I want to be Donniel, a human being. Over the last week, truth be told, I haven’t thought about civilian casualties in Gaza. I haven’t. I’m not declaring myself moral person of the week of the year because of it. I’m not holding myself up in high regard. But part of what we’re trying to do here, Yossi, is just to give, to bear witness and to think things through together.

Donniel: And but also to recognize that who we are is not who we should be. But you could only think about who you should be if you honestly look at who you are. And I didn’t think about it. The bombs were going. I knew that that’s not going to make a strategic difference. It’s doing something. And maybe these bombs will lower Hamas’s ability to manage the war. Maybe they’ll open up corridors for our soldiers to move in a way that’s less dangerous. 

But I think the vast maj, I wanna speak for Donniel and for the vast majority of Israeli society, Gazan deaths weren’t on our mind this week. They weren’t on our mind.

Yossi: So, you know, there was also the emotional response to the scenes of crowds in Gaza celebrating and abusing the bodies that were being paraded through the streets. And I had to remind myself of the people I know from Gaza. And I know people from Gaza. And I know they would never do that.

You know, they’d never, that’s not them. And I served in Gaza. I have memories of encounters with many people there. And this is what I’ve been trying to remind myself of. Don’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed by those images. And so I am trying, I’m struggling to keep myself from being swept away by uncontrollable rage.

Donniel: You know, as this friend was speaking to me, she actually did me a great service because she helped me redirect some of my emotions. And as she was saying, you know, I don’t care, she asked me, how could a society produce these people? She said, and I said to her, do you know how? 

Because if for 70, 50, 30, 20 years, a whole generation of people are raised with the story that Jews and Israelis are killing us and massacring us. And I think the whole whatever, again regardless of the truth, I’m not getting it, this is we’re not talking about it, but if you’re raised,

Yossi: And are thieves.

Donniel: And are thieves, the whole, everything, again, regardless of the truth, I’m not getting into, we’re not talking about this, but if you’re raised, you know, and we see all the pictures and we’ve been seeing them, the movies of the little children in camps, in their summer camps, you know, to help, you know, to fight the murderous Jew, then it’s not a surprise that society could produce that absolute evil. 

But then I said to her, but if we do the same, we could end up in the same place. I said, even though you feel, I don’t care. If you allow yourselves and others to say, kill them all, who do you think you’re going to become? Who do you think you’re going to become? And right now, this is week two. And I think in week two, we have to shift to another mode also. I think what we allowed ourselves to feel in week one, I think has to stop, Yossi.

You can’t allow yourself to say, to vocalize, to feel, kill them all. And then wonder, who are we gonna become? This radical evil is not a surprise. It’s produced. It’s produced by an educational system. It’s produced by a vocabulary.

If you demonize the other, at the end of the day, we Jews and Israelis, we’re not human beings and then you could do what you wanna do with us. When we do the same with them, I think it’s time for us to start talking about moral red lines. Not by the way to give ourselves, not to pat ourselves on the back. There are serious questions that we have to talk about. 

I still believe like you that Hamas, I don’t know if it’s possible and I’m not as confident that it’s possible, but I know that I have a moral right that Hamas should cease to exist as a military and political force. That my life is in unacceptable danger with this community working day in and day out to mass weapons and strategies of destruction to kill and murder every one of us. I’m not denying that. 

But we have to start talking much more seriously and thinking about policies about our moral red lines. The fact that we told civilians to move south is positive. Is positive. It’s a positive thing. But I don’t think that’s enough. Where does it meet you, Yossi?

Yossi: You know, it’s interesting because according to international law, we’re not obligated, for example, to knock on the roof, right? When the IDF is planning to invade a building, that isn’t a requirement of international law. And the whole question of proportionality, it’s very complicated. Proportionality in relation to what? In relation to two things. 

One is the threat that you’re under, and two is your military goal. In terms of the threat we’re under, I think we all feel we are face to face with a genocidal threat. And it’s not only the threat that we’ve already experienced. If we don’t succeed in restoring our deterrence, that is an existential threat in the Middle East for Israel. So the balance of proportionality is already beginning to look a little bit different this time. 

And the second is in terms of the military goals. to disarm Hamas, and that I think is the only way to fulfill the first goal of re-establishing our deterrence, then that means that, for example, the knock on the roof is something that we need to reconsider, and we are reconsidering it. 

Another example, Donniel, something that I’ve really been struggling with. What happens if we get information that there’s a Hamas leader and we know the location, but he’s with his family? There have been many examples in the past where we did not carry out the targeted assassination because of proximity of family. And there were other examples where we did. And what that really means is that each instance needs to be weighed. And I hope we’ll continue to weigh, rather than change the policy in a blanket way, so that wherever we locate a Hamas leader, regardless of what is euphemistically called collateral damage, we strike. 

So what I’m trying to say is I’m struggling, Donniel. I’m struggling between the need for us to play by different rules this time, on the one hand, and on the other hand to still maintain red lines. So you know, if, when I ask myself, what is your bottom line red line? It’s Dresden. No Dresden. No indiscriminate bombing to get at military targets. I don’t believe that we’re allowed to do that. Even now. But between Dresden and restraint, there’s a wide spectrum.

Donniel: See, for you, and I appreciate this, you’re talking policy. For me, I’m first on a personal level, and I think the policy will follow from the personal level, from the personal moral struggle, and from the struggle that you yourself just mentioned. I don’t have a policy articulation yet. I’m working on it, I’m thinking about it. 

On a policy level, I know that a just war is not deemed unjust if the enemy is in the midst of a civilian population. I know that the impossible reality of Gaza is that Gazans are the human shields of Hamas and that when you started by saying you can’t give them, what was the word you used, amnesty or used another word, 

Yossi: Immunity.

Donniel: Immunity. You can’t. I accept that.

That I accept on a conceptual, philosophical, moral level. But I think we Israelis, we have to start talking about our moral red lines. We can’t allow ourselves another week in which whatever happens to them, they deserve. There is a difference between civilians and combatants. And I don’t want a Jewish people to grow up or to continue to grow up in which guys and lives just aren’t on our radar screen. I know we have to fight this war. I know we have to win this war.

But we also have to win it in a way that we remain who we are. Because otherwise, what type of victory is this? And that’s always been the dilemma of Gaza. That’s what makes Gaza so different. We’re not meeting people in the battlefield. The ability for precision attacks like we have in Judea and Samaria doesn’t exist. That’s the nature of this hell, a hell that Hamas produced and, in many ways, we allowed, because we didn’t the consequences were too difficult. 

After this week there is no restraint because of consequences. We see that the consequences of not doing it is worse. But we need to start talking. We need to start talking publicly. We don’t have, I don’t want us to congratulate ourselves. I don’t want us to compare ourselves, you know, to other countries. They don’t, it just doesn’t matter to me. We have to fight this and we have to win. But we have to start a serious conversation in our own inner souls. 

And one which says, yes, all human beings are creating the image of God. What do I have to do? I let you go south, what else do I have to do? Do I have to start feeding? Do I have to start giving electricity? Do I have to create refugee camps in Israel? I don’t care. What is it that I have to do? Because I have to win this war against Hamas. But I have to do so with a constant serious conversation about our moral red lines. Last thoughts, Yossi?

Yossi: I’m approaching this emotionallywith two commitments. The first is to try to create space in myself for anguish, not only about our fate, but the fate of innocence in Gaza and not to allow that anguish to interfere with my determination to destroy Hamas.

Donniel: Yossi, beau, it’s, we need, on this, you should know, there’s such a broad consensus here. There’s no left and there’s no right. So let’s, we wanna win, but we really need to think about how we do so. And we need to start, we need to have that conversation.

That conversation is not an anti-Israeli conversation. That’s a conversation that’s essential for us. Where are these moral red lines? This is, For Heaven’s Sake— Israel at War—Day 9.