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Thoughtful debate elevates us all. Donniel Hartman, Yossi Klein Halevi, and Elana Stein Hain revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the collective consciousness of being Jewish. 

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.

Israel at War — Political Realignment Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi, and this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, and today is day 270.

And so many things are happening as the war progresses, this long, long war. Challenges to the military, challenges in international community, but the length of the war is also changing the political landscape of Israel. As distinct from these shorter wars, which are emotional roller coasters. And before it’s over, you know, I remember the Six Day War, I remember ’73. This war is this lengthy marathon, which while an emotional roller coaster is really changing our life. It’s changing. It’s changing a generation of Israelis. It’s changing Israeli society. And what we see is it is also changing the Israeli political system.

And together we picked that our theme for today is the political realignment taking place in Israel. And it’s happening both on the left and on the right. On the left, the Labor party has officially joined together with what used to be the far-left, Meretz party, under the leadership of Yair Golan, forming a new party called the Liberal Democratic party, and Labor has disappeared. And we should talk about that. The founding party of the country is no more. And this group is in the polls, gets 10, 9, 8, is a significant player, especially in a political system filled with 8 to 11-seat parties, basically. And they’re representing a liberal voice, a liberal side of the Zionist camp.

And on the right, a new party is emerging. It hasn’t yet been formed. And it’s going to require a lot of work with various egos, which will be interesting to see. But a new right-wing party, which doesn’t have a name, probably under the leadership of Naftali Bennett, the leader who many of us eulogized his career as being over, And now is emerging as a central, possibly the most popular politician in Israel, the number one ranking for whom Israelis believe is most qualified to be prime minister. Astonishing transformation. It’s astonishing. We have to go into, we really have to understand that. It’s just, it’s astonishing. And the party, and the polls is getting anywhere from 25, 27, there was even a poll where it’s giving 32 seats.

Yossi: A party that doesn’t yet exist.

Donniel: A party that doesn’t, but that’s always the case. We love it. You know, when it comes into existence, then it’s all because now we’re putting together Bennett Lieberman. Who brings 10 seats, Gideon Sa’ar, three, four seats and Yossi Cohen, and Ayelet Shaked.

Yossi: That’s what they used to call in rock and roll, a supergroup.

Donniel: A supergroup, yeah. I don’t know if political, Netanyahu developed a system that a political party can’t be a supergroup anymore. It needs a strong, this is a supergroup, which will pose its own challenges, but it is creating a realignment in Israeli society that we have to talk about. And they are a direct byproduct of the war and also of the judicial reform.

This whole government has created a new, a really, a new realignment. It’s actually quite interesting to see how Israeli political life is shifting, and I want us to talk today about those two parties. And so where do you wanna start? You wanna start on, on your right or on your left, Yossi?

Yossi: So let’s begin with the late great Labor party. And what I found so astonishing, Donniel, is that the party that founded the state of Israel, that governed uncontested for the first three decades, you know, Israel was a multi-party system. We had 40, 50 parties in those years, and really we had only one party, because labor was undefeatable. So, this party has now, this last week, officially disappeared. Not only have they merged, and they’ve merged before, you know, it’s technical details. Ehud Barak changed the name of the party. But they always kept the institutions of the party.

This time they’ve merged their institutions, their financial basis, with merits. They’ve really disappeared. And what was so astonishing to me about that, that in itself is astonishing. Even more astonishing is nobody seemed to notice. Nobody commented, never mind eulogies, right? But at least note the fact that the Labor Party has just committed suicide. And it’s true, this has been a very long time in the works, but it’s now official. And so, I just want to pause for a moment.

Donniel: Are you smiling?

Yossi: I’m smiling at the strangeness and cruelty of Israeli politics, because I think we all owe Labor in enormous debt. Now, I, my kishkes, my guts, are, were always, on the right because I grew up on the right, and I didn’t grow up with the old kibbutz songs and the Labor-socialist culture. It was never my, but I’ve learned over the years to revere them with all of their arrogance and they made every mistake possible. Their cultural patronizing attitudes toward the Jews from Arab countries, terrible mistakes. And yet those are the people, the revolutionaries of labor who envisioned this country, built it, and sustained it.

Donniel: So one of the things that we can learn, and I’m not sure in every country it will function this way and maybe the multi-party system of Israel actually destabilizes anyone who thinks that they’re permanent and they’re going to be here forever because there’s so many other options. It’s not like you have the Democrats, Republicans, Labor, conservative, like where else are you going to go? You, the categories are owned, they’re establishments.

When we look at the fall of Labor, it was the party of the great leaders, Ben Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Peres, Rabin. These were the figures, Moshe Dayan. It was a party which had an ideology. It did have an ideology. Certainly. It had a strong ideology, but even more than its ideology, it was the party of the great leaders who founded our country and who guided us through the most difficult times.

When you look at the beginning of the 21st century, the thing that shifted while their ideology, a socialist ideology became irrelevant, and their economic theory was indistinguishable from the Likud, their social policies, it was more or less identical. And in fact, a Labor party, which said, we are the advocates of the workers, of the working class, the proletariat, who really carried it? Who did the working class believe? It was looking out for them. That was the Likud, the right wing, the Menachem Begin party.

Yossi: And it respected the culture of the Jews from Arab countries.

Donniel: From Arab countries. So all of this caused an ideological change, but the biggest change, nd you already saw it with our own, with Ehud Barak, it didn’t have great leaders. They lost their mythical leaders. They lost their mythical leaders. And when you look and you said, you’re indistinguishable, you know, you’re not protecting the social well-being of the underclass and of the working class and, and you’re actually seen as part of the problem, and another party took that over and you became, no one’s a socialist in Israel anymore. It just doesn’t exist. And you, you became just like everybody else. But other parties.

Yossi: Right. There’s another reason.

Donniel: Other parties had better leaders because they were, there was a regenerative process in which if you are an outstanding individual, you don’t want to grow up within the labor party. You, you did something and then you wanted your own party. And then within that environment.

Yossi: And the Likud had better leaders, up until….

Donniel: We’re going to get to that. We’re going to get to that side.

Yossi: But there’s one more factor. I think that it led to the decline and fall of Labor, and that is that in the 1990s, it made a strategic decision to substitute as its banner cause peace with Yasser Arafat and the PLO, and substituted that for socialism. And they bet everything on the Oslo process, and they failed. And the Israeli public never forgave them. So it was really a combination of the growing mediocrity of Labor leaders and a courageous and principled ideological shift, which turned out to be a failure.

Donniel: It’s interesting because I don’t share that feeling. Maybe because I identified so much with the aspirations of Oslo.

Yossi: But most Israelis do.

Donniel: But you see, a whole group of other parties emerged, which, at least in theory, still adopted, I can’t even remember all their names, but there was, what was the name of the party that took us out of Gaza? Or the name of the party that took us out of Lebanon? They weren’t even the labor anymore. They all changed their names. It was like a burden.

Yossi: Yisrael achat.

Donniel: One Israel. It’s like the name became a burden. It became a burden, even if the ideology didn’t, because there was still a strong, Labor was never the far left. Meretz, for our audience, it’s the Israeli far-left party.

Yossi: But still Zionists.

Donniel: Still Zionists. The far-left Zionist party. It enabled Labor to have, and it always was, a more centrist party. Remember the settlements were built under the Labour Party. The Labour Party were the ones who were concerned most about issues of Israel’s security. To make it in the Labour Party, you needed to have, you needed to be a general. You needed to be a chief of staff.

Yossi: Now that’s, so, ah, but, Donniel, look at what’s just happened to this merger. The merger of Labor and Meretz, is being headed by Yair Golan, who’s a former deputy commander of the IDF. Now, what’s so interesting about that is that in one way, he satisfies the Labor need for security credentials, so he’s a continuity of traditional Labor in that sense. The other way is he comes out of Meretz. He doesn’t come out Labor. His politics are way to the left of the traditional labor party. And so, he combines the Meretz left-wing sensibility with the security-mindedness of Labor. And that’s, I think, what helped make this merger possible.

Donniel: He’s also the hero of October 7th.

Yossi: Ah. Now we’re coming to the crucial.

Donniel: He’s the hero of October 7th. He was on his own. You know, we have these mythic stories from the Yom Kippur War or from, or from the Six Day War of some commander being cut off from the rest of their forces and, and it’s called the koach this, you know, this, the force of Koach Kahalani, the force of this single individual who didn’t wait for order and just went and filled the gap.

And along comes Yair Golan, who people were accusing him of being anti-Zionist and critical. And he really had, his political career was, was really sunsetting before it began. And on October 7th, this is a man got in his car, found a rifle, it’s like almost goes back to 1948, finds a rifle, and he starts navigating into the Gaza envelope, guided by parents who are looking for their kids. And he would just do these individual sorties into this impossible space, saving tens and tens of individuals’ lives.

And the country looked at him and said, oh, maybe you’re not such an anti-Zionist. And he had a little bit of the hero in him, that military hero, and he’s merging this group together. So the Labor as a name, we’ve spent a lot of time on the Labor, but the ideology of this party, there’s going to be about 8 or 10, ten-seat parties. You have the ultra-Orthodox, you’re going to have Ben Gvir, the fascist ultra-nationalist party. And you can have 10 seats of people who are very clear that they want to return. They want to retry Oslo. They want to try it again.

They take security very seriously. Yair Golan, for example, he’s been saying for months, I don’t know why we have a five-kilometer security zone south of the Lebanon border. We should have a five-kilometer security zone north of the Lebanon border. Why our settlers, why our cities were evacuated? He said, we should have done this months ago. So he’s no little sweetsie. I love the, everybody loves,

Yossi: Well, he was the deputy commander of the IDF.

Donniel: He’s not someone to say, oh, if we just, if we just say yes, then peace. Well, if we just stop one more settlement, the Arabs, everybody will love us and we’ll sing a horah. He’s not that type of person, but he still is a man who speaks, even the name Liberal Democracy. They’re also building on the year beforehand on the judicial reform, they’re trying to create a coalition of forces.

Yossi: But what’s so interesting about his relationship with Meretz is that last year he ran in the merits primaries and couldn’t even get a seat, and now he’s heading the joint list.

Donniel: So, October 7th has shifted the far left to the center-left, in Israel.

Yossi: It is now a security-minded left. It’s a security-minded left.

Donniel: In other words, there’s nobody in Israel, you can’t run in Israeli politics unless you have a stand on Israeli security. You don’t poo poo the dangers. You can’t poo poo dangers anymore.

Yossi: If you feel that we didn’t have the right to go to war with Hamas and try to bring them down, you don’t have a place in Israeli politics, even on the left.

Donniel: Even, and it’s even more than that. You have to have a security platform. You don’t believe that if we just stop the settlements, and then all of a sudden the Palestinians will love us. This is the shift. We understand that we have an enemy. I want peace too. I want a two-state solution. But anybody who wants to talk about it, who doesn’t take seriously the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of people, not tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who want to kill us, who want us dead, literally want us dead. If you don’t factor that into your discourse, you’re irrelevant in Israeli society. That awakening is a very significant awakening.

Yossi: And that’s really what’s led to this, on the face of it, very strange merger. A year ago, it would have been almost inconceivable, Labor and Meretz. And being headed by a general who’s very left-wing, the whole thing would have made no sense.

Donniel: And they couldn’t do it. And as a result, that’s one of the reasons why Netanyahu won. Because Meretz, there is a threshold for our audience, I don’t know if you know this. The only way you get into the Knesset is if you have four seats. Your party has to garner four seats out of the 120 for you to enter the threshold. And this Meretz party, because they refused to join and Labor, each one said, no, we have our purist. They’re living on their reputation of the past.

Defeat, a year, this government. A sense of importance, humility, and it’s actually a very beautiful thing.

Yossi: Humility. Yes. On both sides.

Donniel: And maybe that’s also why there’s no story, because there’s no leaders, there’s no egos there anymore because, what do you, you, you’re dividing up nothingness. Like Meretz was not in the Knesset. The Labor party disappeared.

Yossi: According to polls, over the last year, Labor would not have crossed the threshold.

Donniel: And they rotated. Labor would not have, Meretz, sometimes didn’t. So it’s an indication of a shift, but also I believe of a larger spirit, which let’s turn now to the right.

Yossi: But before we do, I just wanna say one thing, that even though both Labor and Meretz have earned their humility, it’s a wealth, it’s a well-deserved humility. Nevertheless, I think this is a moment of hakarat hatov to.

Donniel: What is hakarat hatov?

Yossi: Hakarat hatov gratitude, expressing gratitude, where we really, the whole country should have paused just briefly and just said, thank you.

Donniel: We don’t do that here. We don’t know how to do that.

Yossi: Oh, we don’t. We don’t. But you know, I felt it so strongly when I came as an immigrant. I had this very strong awareness that I was coming into a country that had been prepared for me. Now, it’s true that the last 40-plus years have had their own challenges. The infrastructure, the country, a thriving country already existed and I felt that I was standing on very, very broad shoulders.

Donniel: Now that’s a very un-Israeli expression. So thank you for that. And I think all of us need to do that. But I think also part of what’s coming out of this last year and a half is such a deep feeling of insecurity, danger, the failure of leadership, a country, which is going to have a great future, but we don’t yet know where, how it’s going to get there, whose government is by the people, but, as I said last week, is not for the people.

And it’s just that people are now also saying, I have to get over my own particular needs and even some of my own ego, because we have to serve the country. And if the two parties ran by themselves, one would pass, one wouldn’t. And there is no place now. It’s like, it’s very similar to all the soldiers who, who volunteered to go into Gaza. You have to get under the stretcher, are you going to stand up and say, I’m here for the wellbeing of this country? And the left is the first one to realign politically and to say, yes, it’s not about my own private allegiances. It’s not about my own agenda. It’s now about winning. It’s about serving this country and making sure that the failures of the last year and a half, close to two years will be overturned, inshallah, shortly.

But that leads us to the right side. Because this new party, which isn’t formed yet, it only exists in the polls and in the minds of the journalists and those who are listening in the quiet conversations in the back of the room. You had the Likud, who had 32 or 33 seats in the last election. That’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s party. You had Gideon, you had Lieberman, who sometimes is to the right, sometimes to the left, calls himself a right-wing liberal. I’m right-wing on security, I’m liberal on policies of state, religion, and economics. A great finance minister of Israel. His power base comes,

Yossi: And also he was a decent defense minister.

Donniel: And a decent defense minister too. His core power base still comes from the people who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. So we had his 10. The Likud lost 15 of its seats already last year. And these seats, these citizens have been, have been really searching for a home. Temporarily, they planted themselves in the centrist party, National Union of Benny Gantz, who was polling in 39. Everybody who left Likud was looking for a place to go. One or two went to Lieberman. Four or five, maybe even less went to Itamar Ben Gvir. The rest were searching for a home and they were sort of planted by Benny Gantz as a temporary hold in all of the elections, in all of the polls, and they said that he, and it made Benny Gantz very popular.

Now that a new party, at least in theory, is emerging, Benny Gantz goes down to 18 seats from the height of, I think he was even 40 something, at the height of the war and he was slowly creeping down and all of those seats, 10 of Lieberman, a few from around another 15, 20 seats, are now sitting, creating a 25 person party, which defines itself as the right. But what’s the difference? We have a right-wing party.

Yossi: What do they want? What is that…?

Donniel: What is the difference? Let’s, let’s try to understand, and I’ll give you the first round, like, what do you believe is the essential attraction of this new coalition of political experienced superstars led by a person who the right wing saw him as the greatest traitor when he was willing to create a coalition with the centrist Yair Lapid Yesh Atid party, sit with an Arab party, he’s the one who, in essence, didn’t allow the Likud to form a coalition. That’s the argument. And now he’s the darling of the right, replacing basically 30, 40 percent of Likud voters, bringing them to him. And even more than that, if Netanyahu doesn’t run, every other leader, every other figure heading the Likud is the same size as Yair Golan’s party.So this, this story, how do you, let’s make sense of this because it’s really very, very powerful.

Yossi: Well, first of all, Naftali Bennett is a known commodity. He was prime minister for a year and in retrospect, he, he looks like a very good prime minister. The country was stable. It was actually safer than it had been in years. The economy was thriving. There’s nothing to sober up Israelis than the experience of this Netanyahu government. So many, many people on the right are doing a kind of penitence, and recognizing that Naftali Bennett was a, I think, a superb prime minister. As was Yair Lapid. He wasn’t in office long enough, but I think that the two of them were devoted to the nation.

And you know, Netanyahu has now set the bar very low. And the bar is, do you place the well being of the country before your own? And Bennett certainly qualifies. I think that what we’re really seeing is the re emergence, potentially, of, I’ll use a Hebrew word and explain it, a mamlachti right wing. Mamlachti is a very difficult word to translate, and if you could help me out on this.

Donniel: I have no idea, I get stuck at the same way that you do. It’s one of the most important words in current Israeli political life.

Yossi: I would call it the dignity of the state.

Donniel: The well being.

Yossi: The well being.

Donniel: You think about, ask not what your country could do for you, but what you could do for your country.

Yossi: You care how the country looks in the world. You care about how the civil service functions.

Donniel: You’re bigger than your, than your person. Something ,you realize that to be a citizen of Israel requires of you to care about something larger than your own private personal agenda. That’s what Mamlachi, it’s technically, it’s translated as, you have a national consciousness, but it doesn’t really work without the explanation.

Yossi: Right. So I think that, that for right wingers who have that consciousness, the greatest sin of this government was that it was Israel’s first non-mamlachti, even anti-mamlachti government. And so they’re looking to restore the integrity, the dignity of Israeli governance. And I think that’s what Bennett offers. And he’s been, by the way, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of his clips in recent months. He’s been out there defending Israel every day. Not always as effectively as he thinks it is. But every so often, he hits a terrific note.

What I enjoy about, and more than that, what I feel inspired when I watch him is this is a guy who loves this country, would do anything for this country. And so I have my disagreements with Bennett, but I would live very comfortably with a second term.

Donniel: You know, when I think of Bennett, and it’s interesting that Bennett is more popular than Avigdor Lieberman, who has more credentials and has been at the business for longer, but there is a fundamental decency about it. There isn’t a stridentness. Like, Avigdor Lieberman is fighting all the time.

Yossi: He’s a, he’s a very competent man, but he’s, he always needs an enemy. It used to be Arab Israelis. Now it’s the ultra Orthodox.

Donniel: And I think Israelis want a politics of decency. That for us to heal after October 7, and none of us know, as we’re talking, we don’t know if by the next podcast we’re going to be at war with Hezbollah or is it going to be at the end of July. And every newspaper is telling us what’s going to happen, just making us more nervous.

And there’s, just having somebody who doesn’t create enemies within. Bennett’s greatest strength, and Lapid as well, and he deserves great credit for it. And I think also Benny Gantz. They’re not interested in fighting with their fellow citizens. Bennett is the one who sat down also with Mansour Abbas, with the Arab Brotherhood Party here in Israel, the ultra-Orthodox Muslim Party. And when he was Prime Minister, he never spoke bad about his coalition partners.

I remember a very famous speech which he gave, which got me, which like made me fall in love, even though I have major disagreements with him as well. When he said, you know, these are people who I never sat with before, I always saw as my enemy. And now I realize they’re not. They care about Israel just as much as I do. And he said this about, he says this about the Labor Party, he says,

Yossi: About Meretz! They’re Israeli patriots.

Donniel: Meretz! Meretz sat with him. And he said, there may, he said that word. Now, I think as a country, we want to be in, we need that, we need that.

Yossi: The difference between. Bennett and Netanyahu is that we saw Bennett grow in office and we’ve seen Netanyahu deteriorate in office.

Donniel: So that decency is what, that’s what goes back to this, your national consciousness. I see it guiding you. And I think the other thing that Israelis are looking for is we are looking for a national unity government. Now, throughout my life, it started in the, it was somewhere in the 70s or 80s, where Israelis didn’t want one party to rule anymore. They didn’t want one party to win. They voted for one party so that their party would so called win, but at the end, they wanted their party to be joined with other parties. That somehow the complexity of ideas, the challenges that we’re facing, requires a certain bipartisanship, not just of willingness to stand with each other, but to balance each other.

Yossi: Now, that’s interesting hearing it from you because I know that in the past you have felt that a unity government is a government of paralysis.

Donniel: I still feel that. I’m worried about that. That’s the flip side. I worry about it, but I’m more worried if you ask me what’s a greater fear, like when we saw this last year when a small right wing, a slight majority of 64 seats says, we can do anything we want. We want to win. And I believe the whole judicial reform had nothing to do with judicial reform. This goes beyond.

Yossi: Oh absolutely. Absolutely.

Donniel: It had just about, it was a power play. It was winning because in fact, as we now know, the judicial reform had already been occurred silently and quietly under right wing minister.

Yossi: Half the Supreme Court justices are conservative.

Donniel: Are conservative already. So they didn’t even need the whole thing, but it was just about, I’m going to show you, I think this country doesn’t want that. And so I’m afraid of the mediocrity of a coalition government, of a broad one, but at the same time, people want balance and they don’t want to just win. And it’s interesting that the figures who are emerging, The Bennett, the Gantz, the Yair Lapid, the Yair Golan, the Mansour Abbas could all sit together.

Yossi: Yes. They already have.

Donniel: They have. They’ve proven it. The interesting challenge will be for Bennett, his greatest challenge will not be with the other coalition, with the other parties. It’ll be, how does he, who wins? How does he sit with Avigdor Lieberman? How does he sit with Yossi Cohen? You know, Gideon Sa’ar is notorious for always getting a temper tantrum and saying you’re not pure enough and leaving and Ayelet Shaked, it’s going to be challenging.

Could they understand that at this moment, if Bennett ran in the past and adopted an ideology, which was alien to his voters, when he made the compromise to sit with the center, will these other people realize that the population actually wants that culture that Bennett stands for?

Yossi: Yeah. I think, I think that Avigdor Lieberman is the big wild card here because he sees himself as prime ministerial material, and he may be. But my sense is that Bennett will be more palatable. Lieberman had, there were question marks over Lieberman. And the other piece of this, Donniel, that I want to go back to something you said earlier, just in passing, and I want to expand on it, which is that a post-Netanyahu Likud would be effectively reduced to a minor party, 10 seats, 12, whatever it is, if they’re lucky.

And so I think we’re seeing something historic happening here, which October 7th has hastened. And that is the decline and fall of the two parties that have dominated Israeli politics since before the establishment of the state, from the Zionist movement. We have been in a way, held prisoner by these pre-state parties. And we desperately need parties that are freed from the pre-state baggage, the history, the recriminations, the outdated ideologies.

And here I agree with you that Labor and Meretz have taken the first step by not only merging and erasing their previous identities, but giving themselves an entirely new name that reflects Israeli reality. And so, I’m hoping that the Likud is going to go the way of Labor, and the faster the better. And I have a lot, a lot of anticipation for this as yet unformed, center right or right, moderate right, mamlachti party.

Donniel: Decent.

Yossi: Decent.

Donniel: Decent. Who aren’t about pointing out other people’s failures. And also, Who get up in the morning and want to serve the people.

Maybe, you know, so many people speak about October 7th. There’s Israel before October 7th, Israel post October 7th. Sometimes I think it’s exaggerated. It is a profound trauma. But on this political redrawing of the map, October 7th is unleashing some different forces. And both you and I pray that these forces will be forces for good and forces that help us get to the Israel of tomorrow that we’re all searching for.

Yossi, it’s wonderful being with you. Great to be with you. This is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, Day 270.

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