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.

Morality and Survival 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. And it still is Israel at War. I don’t know if the war will come to an end until the hostages come back. And again, today, three soldiers were killed and our children are still in danger. So it’s still 459 days of something that began and is still unresolved.

And Yossi, one of the things that we’ve tried to do for much of this period, these hundreds of days, but also it’s, it’s a deep part of what you and I try to do is to try to understand and Israeli society, what’s happening to us—during the war, before the war—and we picked for today a topic which we’re calling “morality and survival,” which is such a deep issue and concern in Israeli society. But just like last week, we were focusing on silence about the day after.

Today we want to talk about silence when it comes to moral discourse. We’re not going to talk about whether the Israeli army is acting morally or not acting morally. That’s not our, our, our conversation today. It’s about the state of moral discourse in Israeli society, and in particular, the juxtaposition of morality and survival, and the perception that they’re, they’re in deep conflict with each other.

We’re in an interesting place where Israeli society doesn’t really want to talk about morality right now. Israeli society always saw itself, it’s, it’s self perception is both as an army and as a people, as a profoundly moral one. When we speak about our army, we say we are the most moral army in the world. And it’s one of our badges. Like we are the most moral army. Nobody’s going to teach us ethics because not only is the whole world flawed, but we care about these things. These are our standards.

It’s interesting. That conversation is not happening now in Israel. It’s just not happening. Recently, I was teaching a group of students and I was talking about the place of morality in our identity and the need to think about these questions. And one of the students, she raised her hand and she says, I can’t talk about morality. I, I can only, I’m too worried about our security. So I said to her, you know, on security and survival, I said, why are you claiming that they’re in conflict with each other?

Yossi: And we never felt that way in the past.

Donniel: In the past, it wasn’t this—you had to pick. Maybe, it could be, I wasn’t here in 1947 or in the 30s or the 40s. The early, some of the decisions that Ben Gurion had to make.

Yossi: But in our memory and lifetime.

Donniel: Certainly in a post ’67 universe. It was clear, and also conceptually, security, survival, are self defense principles. Self defense is not morally permissible. Self defense is a moral obligation.

So I was talking to her, and I was saying, like, why are you juxtaposing them? Self defense, to defend yourself if all people are created in the image of God. We’re created in the image of God, and just like I have to worry about other people’s rights, I have to worry about our rights. And so, I said, why are you feeling this?

And I spoke, and I answered all of her questions, and she had nothing more. She heard, she realized that I had answered all of her questions. And she still didn’t agree with me. She couldn’t even articulate. It was coming, and I moved myself deeply. I was convinced. I was convinced that absolutely…And she was looking at me and saying, No, you know, I hear you. But there’s something, I can’t articulate why. There’s something about this moral conversation that frightens me. She was frightened.

And I want us to understand and to get to the depth of this. Because Israel’s going to have to reclaim its moral conversation. It’s going to have to reclaim its moral aspirations. But something has been put on hold. And I think to understand where Israel is right now is to also understand the state of this moral discourse and the relationship between morality and survival. So this is where we find ourselves right now. And Yossi, how do you, what’s happening here?

Yossi: It’s so interesting, Donniel, because the state of Israeli moral discourse can be summed up in one word, silence. And the silence that we spoke about last week is, in some ways, most telling of all in the absence of a moral discourse. And what makes this so strange is that in the past, we have fought wars that were far less brutal than this one. And yet, every one of our wars that I’ve experienced has generated some sort of moral conversation, sometimes angst, sometimes protest. There are no protests. The Israeli left is completely silent on the morality of this war.

And there’s another, there’s an obvious paradox here, which is, this is by far the most critiqued and criticized of Israel’s wars.

Donniel: On an international level.

Yossi: On an international level. We are under a moral microscope, and it’s as if there’s an inverse proportion between the amount of criticism abroad and our ability to critique ourselves. And I think that the two are Intimately related.

And I’ll speak for myself, I, and we’ve talked about this in the past here that Israelis feel, I feel, that we are facing a lynch mob, that we’re being accused of the most inconceivable crimes, and they’re inconceivable because we know we’re innocent. We know the IDF because we are the IDF. It’s us, it’s our kids, it’s our neighbors. We know what the IDF does and what it doesn’t do. And we know there’s recklessness.

And we also know in every war, in our wars as well, there have been instances of war crimes. But we know that the war itself is not a crime. We don’t fight wars that are inherently war crimes. Which is exactly what we’re being accused of. We’re not being accused of committing war crimes. We’re being accused by many of our critics of fighting a war that is inherently illegitimate, that is itself a crime. And of course, we’re being condemned by our most extreme critics for being incapable of fighting a legitimate war because the state is illegitimate.

So, and, and there is a kind of, and I see this when I speak to Israelis about how we’re being critiqued abroad, there’s a kind of blurring of these different categories of criticism. And it’s as if everyone is criticizing us for being in an illegitimate state that has no right to defend itself.

And of course, there really are three kinds of criticism we’ve been getting. The first, from our friends, is that the war is legitimate, it’s understandable, you had the right to self defense, but you went too far. But you went too far. That’s a form of criticism that I think we really need to address for our own sake.

The second form of criticism is that, no, you really never had the right to defend yourselves because of the occupation, because Palestinians were, were responding, were acting from a place of resistance.

And then again, the third most extreme form of criticism is you have no right to exist. So you have no right to defend yourselves. And we hear all three forms of criticism at once. And so the natural tendency is to shut down.

I’ll give you, I’ll give you one example, a report in the paper today. The American Historical Association just voted to denounce Israel for, they called it scholasticide, a new word. They invented a new term, and again, the I, the I, the, you know, the, the genocide. It’s so important for our critics to have that suffix, the I D E, attached to this war. What is scholasticide? We’ve attacked schools in Gaza. Now, yes, we’ve attacked schools where Hamas has set up headquarters.
We attacked schools that were not in session, but we are committing scholasticide, and there is a growing tendency among our more extreme critics to actually invent a new language of morality by which to judge us. So how do you take that seriously? Thank you for letting me vent on that. I, I, it’s, it’s, it’s something that’s, it’s burning in me.

Donniel: That’s very interesting. No, I, I hear you because I feel it. We all feel it. You can’t be a lover of Israel and not feel upset. You know, I’m not shy from moral criticism. Like, you know, the first one that you mentioned, I have never been shy from it. And I actually feel that it’s precisely our duty, if our tradition teaches us that you have to critique God, when God doesn’t live up to moral standards, and when our tradition teaches us that you have to critique the Torah.

Yossi: Does that mean I have to critique myself? Can’t I just critique God?

Donniel: Right, so, like, exactly. But to think that there’s anything immune or that the state of Israel should be immune is horrific. But you’re right. There’s such an onslaught, really such a, a, a moral onslaught from so many levels, you’re just frightened from any, you don’t want to have to do with, there’s, it’s like there’s no place for a moral conversation.

Do you know where I felt it was very interesting? There was a remarkable interview with Secretary of State Blinken in the New York Times, where it wasn’t an editorial, it was his voice. And he spoke, and he said, because they were asking him over and over and over again about you were supporting and you’re the one who gave Israel the bombs, and he was like a staunch, old, you know, old Democrat, pro-Israel, working, it’s his, and his whole being, and he’s such a good friend. He really was. He’s been with us from the beginning.

And you know, he gave criticism of the first order. He said it himself. But here he was just pushing at one point, he says, you know, and I wonder how come nobody anywhere in the world is criticizing Hamas right now. There’s no more criticizing of October 7th. That’s like not even another conversation, but he said, why isn’t anybody just saying you want the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to stop? Why aren’t people criticizing Hamas and saying, stop the fight? Just lay down your weapons, surrender. The notion that Hamas has any culpability, whether for October 7th or after October 7th for what’s happening, you know, we can go into greater details of Hamas stealing humanitarian aid.

So there, there is this sense, like hearing it, by the way, from him, Israelis couldn’t stop. Now, everybody, it’s used to be, you know, Haaretz quotes the New York Times. Now even the right-wing papers, everybody after this interview, this was widely spread in Israel, and also misquoted, but the, on other levels…

But Blinken was trying to say there’s something wrong going on here, which is what you’re giving evidence to, what you’re really testifying. And, and, and you’re right, Israelis are feeling it. They’re just tired.

Yossi: And angry.

Donniel: They’re angry. You’re tired from moral criticism all the time. When you leave it, you know, when it’s focused and when you can understand where it’s, but when it is weaponized the way you mentioned, it’s just, there’s no room in the pro Israel community for this moral criticism, which is a horrific thing. But it’s, it, but we have to understand it’s psychological.

Yossi: With serious consequences.

Donniel: With very serious consequences. There’s another side that I want to broach with you that I’ve been thinking about. And I’m very ambivalent about this, ambivalent about talking about it, and ambivalent about what I feel. There is this deep ambivalence: is the war in Gaza a war that our standard moral categories of morality of war weren’t prepared for? Were we not prepared for them?

The nature of that war, and I’m very frightened of this. You know, honestly, I, I don’t like it, but you can’t be honest or, or I would say whether I’m thinking about it, I certainly could put it in the hearts and minds of many Israelis that they feel that there are certain standards of war which apply, and we, our code of ethics of our army is very clear about what we’re supposed to do and the distinction between combatants and non-combatants.

But you mentioned the school, the nature of Gaza. The nature of this 400 square kilometer area, where the intersection and overlapping of military targets, civilian targets, tunnels, our experience in the past of horrific, horrific deaths, this reality, going into the war, I could understand what this girl is telling me is, I have to, how do I win the war, forget total victory, how do I even function?

Does morality… or the standards, the natural, the normal standards of morality. Are there times when in self-defense, you just, you’re in another terrain, where there’s nothing that you could do, it’s not even in your hands anymore. Now this is so dangerous, because now you have a morally exempt space. Whenever there is a morally exempt space, you’re in great danger.

Yossi: I think the problem is that we are in uncharted moral territory. We are not in a morally exempt space, but a morally undefined space. When the laws of war were set out after World War II, the assumption was you’re dealing with conventional armies. Now we’re dealing with terrorist forces that have extraordinary power that didn’t exist at the end of World War II when international law began to grapple with the morality of war. And so that’s, that’s one, one thing.

What do you do when you’re, and I just recently came across this statistic, thousands of homes in Gaza were booby trapped? How do you deal with that kind of warfare? How do you make clear distinctions between combatants and non-combatants? Hamas don’t wear uniforms. Do you treat every male 18 and over or 14 and over? We’re talking about Hamas. They use, they use kids. Are they all combatants? Is the distinction gender in Gaza? What do you do? How do you determine who’s a combatant and who isn’t?

Donniel: But let’s just, I want to help us, because we’re not engaging in a conversation, again, about what morality, it’s about from an Israeli perspective, you’re sitting and watching this in Israeli newspapers, we know. Every single house in northern Gaza now is booby trapped. So like, you’re just looking at it and you’re saying, So what moral conversation do you want me to have?

Yossi: And the problem is we don’t have, not only don’t we have rules, we don’t have a language with which to discuss this. And it’s not only us. I think that that’s true for the international community.

And there’s another aspect here, which is October 7th and how October 7th changed the Israeli perception of the moral parameters of war. I heard a story today, I’m not going to repeat it, something that I hadn’t heard yet about what happened on October 7th. And we all have this sense that we touched the abyss on October 7th, and we may never know the full depths of what happened there.

Donniel: Existential abyss or moral abyss?

Yossi: No, no, a moral abyss.

Donniel: That we encountered an evil.

Yossi: Yes, yes. That’s a very important distinction you just said. Because there is an existential dimension that we’ve talked about, and I think we need to talk about it in this context as well. About why Israelis are shying away from a moral conversation, but there is also the sense that on October 7th we stared into the abyss. And when you encounter that level of evil, something changes in the ground rules.

Now, the allies experienced that in World War II. And it’s not a coincidence that when you talk to Israelis about what, what is your framework, what is the lens through which you perceive Gaza? What I hear over and over again is World War II, the bombing of German cities, and leaving aside again whether the analogy is morally apt or not, that’s the default position. That’s the emotional context.

Donniel: So we’re quoting Dresden and Hiroshima, not because of—there, we were willing to kill civilians in order to achieve an end, but it was the context of World War II. What do you mean by that?

Yossi: That when you are fighting a level of evil that breaks all preexisting categories…

Donniel: The rules are off.

Yossi: The rules are different. And again, I’m not saying this as a justification.

Donniel: No, we’re not engaging in that.

Yossi: And I’ve been struck over and over again in conversations with Israelis, World War II. And they don’t mean the Holocaust. They, they don’t mean that.

Donniel: So it’s not the pogrom of October 7th. It’s the encounter with…

Yossi: No, no, no. How do you fight a military war with this type of evil? Yes, yes. Very much so.

Donniel: I think, you know, as I’m hearing you and again, our experiences of Israeli society, it’s the shock of being in this reality and then having somebody talk to you about your moral responsibilities towards them. Like, what are you insane? Like, you’re, you’re even raising for me, you expect me to have moral empathy? Like, and there’s, there’s this, it’s such a dominant…

Yossi: And you know what, at least if you were to acknowledge that we are fighting a Nazi-like regime, a Nazi-like force that might give us some shared moral discourse, but if you don’t understand the nature of the enemy we’re fighting, then how could you possibly critique me?

So that, again, this connects to the first point that, you know, the weaponizing and the gap between, so we have a weaponizing of moral conversation. We have the sense that this maybe is a unique category in morality of war, that some of the more civil boundaries, sure, of course you can target civilians, but that just don’t seem to work in the context of Gaza.

The third is that we’ve encountered a barbarism that emotionally, you know, that’s why also Israelis, even though I tried not to talk about the war, about what the army did, but I spoke a lot about humanitarian aid. It’s deaf ears. It is, it’s like, there’s like, nobody’s listening, like you, you want a moral compassion from me towards somebody right now, in this, in level of this barbarism? So I think that’s very, very profound.

Yossi: There’s a dark side to this, which is that if Nazi Germany is the framework and the allied bombing of German cities is the prelude, then what you’re really saying is there were no innocents in Gaza. And we hear this a lot from Israelis. There are no innocents.

And what’s the proof? The proof that Israelis will offer over and over again is look at what they did on October 7th, not with, not inside the kibbutzim, when they dragged the hostages and the dead bodies through the streets of Gaza, and thousands of people came out. Now, I’ve thought a lot about those scenes were horrific, but to go from those scenes and draw the conclusion that there were no innocents in Gaza, that’s a very big leap.

And I’ll say something even more radical, which is that by the moral laws of war, it doesn’t matter if you have the most obnoxious opinions. You could be a supporter of Hamas. If you’re a noncombatant, you’re an innocent. You could have been cheering Hamas in the streets on October 7th.

Donniel: You know, this might also explain the difference between the military code of ethic, which I know some people are crossing, but just in principle says you can’t target non-combatants.

Yossi: Period.

Donniel: Period. You can’t target. But Israeli society, that’s just…you want me to have sympathy? You’re, you’re calling on me. I’m not the one who has to decide as a civilian. We’re talking about the state of the conversation.

Yossi: That’s really important.

Donniel: You’re talking about the state of the conversation. So the soldiers should, could decide and maybe, you know, and again, there’s, there’s a correct correlation between the two and, and there are significant challenges and they’ve been reported. We’re starting to have some reports about them in the Israeli press about whether there are soldiers or certain units that aren’t acting the way they should be acting. But we’re talking about the state of the conversation. So it’s one thing, these people who are talking, they’re not going to shoot. They’re just talking. You want me to sit here and have moral angst? I’m not having any moral angst at this moment.

I want to add one other dimension to it, which, you know, a lot of this is understood and understandable, and this too is understood and understandable, forgivable, but it, but also has profound consequences. October 7th made Israelis again feel like they’re victims, we’re victims, and victims don’t have moral responsibilities. Victims can’t even imagine that they have moral power. What’s so dangerous is you have it, but when you’re in the mindset of victimhood, you’re not even cognizant. agency to inflict harm. You’re not even, you’re not even in that mindset.

And victimhood also allows you rage, allows you hostility, allows you this space whereby, you know, everything you do as a result of that is somehow, what is it? The temp… it’s whether it’s temporary insanity or, or you stretch far beyond the normal parameters as to what constitutes self defense, where a victim could lash out against their attacker.

Yossi: As the Palestinians would put it, all means are justified.

Donniel: All means are justified. And here, what happens when the state of Israel, who is no longer in October 7th, but is in October 8th, but has a mindset of October 7th, just doesn’t know how to talk about morality. October 8th is not shaping our moral discourse. October 7th is. And that sense of victimhood, victimhood is the danger of it. And you know where we see it? That’s also part of the tragedy of Palestinian society. Palestinian society embraces, or so many of them or parts of them, whatever, embrace terror. Because as victims, I’m allowed to. As victims, this is what… I’m allowed to lash out. I don’t, I’m not governed by these rules. Once you’ve victimized me, I don’t have moral responsibility towards you.

And Israeli society, in one day, reclaimed this massive victimhood identity, and if we talk about the future, you know, last week we spoke about the need to think about Gaza tomorrow, Israel tomorrow, is, we can’t continue.

Yossi: It’s such an important point you’re bringing up, Donniel, and Israeli society should look at Palestinian society and the Palestinian national movement as a cautionary tale, a warning against, against centralizing victimhood in your identity. Because not only does victimhood supposedly free you of moral constraints and responsibilities, but it frees you from all responsibilities.

And so you can turn down one piece of offer after another because it’s never perfect. It’s not good enough, and I’m the victim, and therefore the responsibility is all on you to compromise. I don’t have to compromise on anything because I’m the victim. That’s the story, in one sense, of the failure of Palestinian nationalism, Palestinian diplomacy. It’s a failure of responsibility.

Donniel: It’s so interesting how both our societies who are at war with each other are actually learning the worst things from each other. So we’re going back and forth and back and forth.

Yossi: But I wanna add another dimension. Until now we’ve really framed this conversation in an emotional sense, these are the, these are the emotional reasons why we don’t have a robust moral conversation today.

But I think there’s, there’s also a very practical reason. And that is that October 7th changed the ground rules. And now I don’t mean the brutality or the shock. I mean, the goal of the war, of this war was qualitatively different from any war we have fought until now in our asymmetrical conflicts either with Hamas or Hezbollah. This time the goal was not to contain Hamas, to dissuade them from firing rockets. The goal was to bring them down. It was to destroy the Iranian ring around Israel’s borders. You can’t do that with the old rules of engagement that the IDF had.

So, the New York Times had its big expose, supposed expose, of how the army changed the rules of engagement. Now, you and I read that, we talked about it, and we both had the same reaction, yeah. So, you know, where’s the smoking gun here? Of course we changed the rules of engagement, because we could not win. You can’t meet your goals, your more expanded goals, with those old…those old rules of engagement made sense if you’re fighting a limited war, which will leave Hamas where it is and Hezbollah where it is. And so, Israeli society intuitively understood on October 8th…

Donniel: That we have to destroy it. This complete victory requires of us to put aside something.

Yossi: Not even to totally destroy Hamas, but to break the siege on our borders required a level of warfare that we had not experienced. Before, and we all understood that. And so, well, yeah, so the Times, you know, 14-15 months later, the Times comes up with this big expose, which, which the paper spreads as a banner headline. And it didn’t make a ripple among Israelis who encountered that report, not a ripple, for good reason, because the Times wasn’t, didn’t address the war that we were fighting.

Donniel: You know, but this also points to the challenges. You know, just like victimhood, when you feel that your goal is to destroy, what is that going to do to you? When that’s the aim, and now that we know we can’t, like, but you just, you, you can’t press a button.

Yossi: But we did. We did break.

Donniel: We did part of it.

Yossi: We broke the siege on our borders. That’s a Dayenu moment.

Yossi: We did. That is. But now we’re stuck with this notion of destroying Hamas and we’re, you know, connecting to last week. We’re going to have to agree to a ceasefire with the Hamas that we haven’t destroyed in order to get our hostages home.

And, but this language, that’s why also you have to be very careful, you see how all these terms and these experiences have shaped Israeli society, and you’re right, you’re right, if I have to reclaim deterrence, if I have to destroy, there’s, this girl really echoed, she really mirrored something, she says, I hear you, I hear all your answers, it’s true, self defense, Is it moral? I need something else, she’s saying. There’s something else happening here that I’m frightened of, and I don’t know if I could live. Literally, you know, is it, you know, is it morality or is it survival? And it doesn’t have to be that, but there are times when it feels like it is.

You know, and if we had this conversation, I don’t think we could have had this conversation at the beginning of the war. When it was most powerful, and we weren’t even conscious that there was a challenge back then. Now, 459 days later, the challenges were still there. And as educators, we’re still there. How much longer is it legitimate for us to be there? I actually know, but the gap between where Israelis are and where they’re willing to go, 459 days later is, is huge.

The state of moral discourse in Israel, is today, is a problem. It’s a moral problem of its own. Separate from the war itself.

Yossi: Well put.

Donniel: You know, before we conclude, if I could just shift gears for one small second, cause I owe a thanks to our friend David Makovsky. Last episode, I said that Israel, 35 percent of Gaza is under Israeli military occupation, which is similar to Area C.

Yossi: In the West Bank.

Donniel: To Area C in the West Bank. And David Makovsky, who probably knows more about each one of the Area A, B, C, he spends his whole lifetime analyzing and thinking about the future returned and said it’s actually area C is closer to 60 percent, which upsets me unto itself. I have to think about what that means, but that facts get in the way.

But it’s still, you know, we speak so much about facts and truth, here there was, I spoke inaccurately. And so I just wanted to correct that and to thank David for bringing that to our awareness.

And with that, Yossi, you know, just to end with our weekly bracha, but maybe it looks like the hostage conversation is going to another step up. You never know. It’s hard to tell, but, I really want by next week, I, I think all of us, we want that by next week we could have some news about our family and our children. So Yossi, thank you.

Yossi: Thank you.

Donniel: Nice being with you.

Yossi: Pleasure.