Israel at War – Red Lines 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, Israel at War, Day 593.

I feel it’s been a long time, we missed a week. You were traveling and I was traveling and so much happened and there’s so much that I want to talk about about what happened, because very often I feel I don’t know exactly what I feel about what happened yesterday without speaking it through with you, Yossi. But I’m gonna have to let yesterday be yesterday, and… because at our pace, it’s today and tomorrow that is more compelling for us. And we’ll leave last week to last week.

Somehow I have a feeling that what happened last week is going to happen again. As Ecclesiastes says, and he said it only specifically about Israeli political life, ein chadash tachat hashemesh, there is nothing new under the sun. So somehow the whole Trump trip and Israel’s response and the dynamic between Israel and President Trump, all of that somehow, I think, is not completely yesterday’s conversation. But for us, it’s not what’s upsetting us or it’s not what we’re struggling with today.

And our theme, we chose to call red lines. And it’s in the plural because as we were thinking about today’s subject, we found that you and I had different red lines. Your lines aren’t the same as my lines. And one of the lines that hit you very, very deeply, you felt, Donniel, this is what we have to talk about, was the former deputy general of the IDF today, the head of the new Israeli party, the Democratic party, which is rising in the polls and getting 15, sometimes even 17 seats in any event. It’s going to be a major player in the next election as distinct from Meretz and Labor when they were running by themselves when only one passed the threshold of four seats

He’s a major major player in Israeli left, center-left life. He gave the following interview when he said, a sane country does not wage war against civilians. It does not kill babies for a hobby. It does not set goals involving the expulsion of populations. Everybody in Israel, almost uniform critiqued his notion, this killing babies for a hobby. That was a line that went too far. It wasn’t just the Likud that critiqued Golan. It was people on the center and on the left.

And for me, one of his biggest critics was you. You felt, Donniel, this is just beyond the pale. And while I feel that his use of the term hobby unfortunate and it’s not a term I would ever use, I was not as upset because I interpreted everything he was saying differently, but I’ll get to that. But since it was your… This is something that we need to talk about and I want to start with you. When you heard that statement and it activated such a visceral and emotional and intellectual response, what is it, Yossi?

Yossi: So we’re fighting several wars simultaneously. The first obvious war is on the battlefield. The second war is for the legitimacy of Israel, the legitimacy of the Jewish story. And we’ve never been under such sustained and global assault as we are now. And so when I hear a leading figure in Israeli politics, Yair Golan, carelessly, almost almost cavalierly throwing around terms that we know are going to to to reappear in the indictment against Israel, an accusation that is so outrageous that he had to immediately walk it back. He didn’t apologize, but he did qualify by saying, no, I didn’t mean the army. Of course, not our brave soldiers. I meant the government.

That kind of recklessness, that kind of disregard for that other war that we’re fighting and the consequences of our words about other war is… It hit me in the same way that when the far-right government ministers, Smotrich and Ben Gvir, throw around language that is, frankly, genocidal, and without any disregard for how that’s going to impact on our ability to fight the war against our criminalization, against the delegitimization of the Jewish story. That puts me over the edge. To undermine our ability to defend ourselves on the battlefield or to defend ourselves in the war for Israel’s legitimacy, for me…

Donniel: It was too much.

Yossi: Yehareig ve-al ya-avor.

Donniel: It’s a red line.

Yossi: Where does this hit you?

Donniel: But beforehand I want to ask you a question because I think it needs to be spelled out because I very much resonate, you know, you and I, we disagree and actually, the truth is, we disagree about much less than we agree about. We really do agree on our fundamental values. Sometimes the weight we give to different things, but I want to ask you something else because, I know you feel very, very strongly, and I know you’re engaged in this in your own work, more than I do, I am, in a battle against the delegitimizers of Israel.

It’s like that’s, and even if you’re, when you’re not in your own mind, you’re always fighting that fight, whether it’s Yossi of 2025 or it’s Yossi over the last 30, 40 years has spent so much time and effort fighting for the legitimacy of our causes and the legitimacy of Israel’s, of what Israel is doing and trying to, give expression to the complexity of the reality we face. And I appreciate that when you hear a Yair Golan colleague using this word hobby, it’s like you feel like the carpet is, like how are you gonna defend that?

But I just wanna ask, do you really think that this statement is gonna make a qualitative difference amongst the enemies themselves? If we just look, open up the paper every day. It’s so much there already. And then before we can even get into trying to understanding the statement, just do you feel this really weakens you objectively that the enemies needed?

Yossi: It’s a great question. It’s a great question. And certainly, genocidal statements by government ministers with actual power, not people sitting in the opposition, does far more damage to Israel. And that drives me to distraction. So in a way, Yair Golan is just feeding into this general Israeli obtuseness, a complete, it’s an expression of our provincialness that we don’t understand that the world is listening in on our conversation. And it has consequences. So yes, you’re right, of course you’re right. Yair Golan’s statement in isolation is a blip.

But then you factor in the statement by former Prime Minister Eud Olmert telling the BBC no less, as if the BBC can be trusted with our moral angst, as if the BBC is a platform for what that Jews should trust with our deepest moral struggles. And in his stupidity, former Prime Minister Olmert says what Israel is doing in Gaza is very close to war crimes. Now, what does very close mean? How do you measure that?

And so it’s cumulative, Donniel, this frustration that I feel. And you know, you had a beautiful line in your most recent book. You said the Jews are a story that we tell ourselves of who we are. And without the legitimacy of the Jewish story, we have no existence. We have survived for thousands of years based on the strength and credibility of the Jewish story.

Now, the Jewish story is not only under attack from without, it’s also under attack from within. First by the far right, which is undermining the moral credibility of the Jewish story, and there I’m with you completely, but it’s also being undermined by the recklessness on the left, which is adapting the language of delegitimization and not feeling a sense of moral responsibility to defend our story.

Donniel: I hear you. You asked me before, how did it hit me? First of all, I would never use the word hobby.

Yossi: No, I know you wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t.

Donniel: It was, it’s an unfortunate term.

Yossi: Well, here we can disagree on the word unfortunate.

Donniel: It was actually, it was a profoundly inappropriate term.

Yossi: Okay, now we’re getting warmer.

Donniel: We’re getting warmer. See, I don’t want to say problematic, because I don’t know how much damage it does. I also would never use the word. I don’t want to use the word war crimes. I don’t want to use that association of terms.

But we are facing a different war now, especially in the second stage. And I know, don’t, we talked about this, but I don’t know if we really talked about it. I have a very, very different feeling about this stage of the war than the first stage of the war.

First stage of the war, I was bothered by the lack of moral discourse and reflection. And then you and I, would speak over and again and you would say to me, I share with you, but it’s not now, not now, it’s not the central issue now until we don’t reclaim our deterrence, until we don’t do A, B, C, and D, we have to have the freedom to act and to do.

But, and he said, and you were very, it’s not that you don’t care about moral principles, but the first stage of the war was without doubt in my mind, a just war. I had questions about whether every part of that war was a just war, which was being fought justly, and whether we were struggling appropriately. Because part of the way you fight a just war justly is not that you make mistakes, but that you have a system in place to think about it, where you talk openly about it, you struggle with the questions. And then like every war, you try to come as close as possible to fighting a justly, to play on Olmert. That’s your game. How close are you to fighting a justly, or how much are you failing because as long as you talk about it and struggle?

At this stage of the war, I feel we’re doing something completely different. I know the government is officially speaking about that this is a war against Hamas, but I don’t believe that, Yossi. I believe that there are other possibilities on the table pushed for by the American government, pushed by the international community, pushed by our allies or potential allies in the Arab world, which I at least believe we need to explore before engaging in a war of self-defense. So I don’t…

Yossi: You’re speaking about political options.

Donniel: Political options, yes. There are political options that I know aren’t simple, but I’d like to explore them. They’re certainly after 500 and I don’t know when this stage started, 60 days, there’s at least a plausible argument to say that you only have a right to go to war after you exhaust other options. That a just war is legitimate as long as it’s a war of self-defense. And if your self-defense could be achieved otherwise, you have to at least explore it. And I’m not even putting the hostages into the story here.

But after 570 days, 60, 70 days, that Hamas coming out again, I know aggravates you, but somebody has to ask maybe there’s another way and this is not the most effective way. And I believe that much of this is motivated by internal government coalition calculations and needs, motivated by some of the people who you spoke about who are clearly committed ideologically to unjust wars and that’s the people, you know, the extremes. And it’s not the self-defense of Israel that’s motivating them. But they’re guiding it, and I think Netanyahu was trying to salvage some pictures so that the stain of October 7th is gone and at the end of the day, not through any careful analysis or having to look carefully, explicitly.

This stage of the war involves the following plan, word for word. The Israeli government is going to capture area after area of Gaza, what’s now called the Rafah protocol or model. We’re going to take over an area, wipe out every single building, everything that is there, basically level it. After it’s leveled, you allow civilian population to return. Then you begin to distribute some form of humanitarian aid distributed by Israel not given through Hamas whether that will work or not.

And the idea is to do this over and over again throughout Gaza, move the population back and forth with the explicit aim that Netanyahu stated of facilitating the Trump plan, which involves the removal of Gazans from Gaza, where they will voluntarily want to simply get up and say, I’ve had enough. There is no life here. I have wiped everything out. All you have, you don’t have schools, you don’t have industry, you have nothing. You have tent cities with a weekly distribution of food. I don’t want to.

So in this context, when I hear Yair Golan, I wouldn’t use his words. But I hear somebody, there’s an angst, Yossi, that caused him to misspeak. And he did say a sane country. He didn’t say an army. His critique was really against the government. And he’s seeing things going out of control without any conversation. And at least one of the things that he activated is a conversation. He started a conversation.

Yossi: So I have, my problem, Donniel, is, and this is something that I struggle with all the time, is that I’m torn between conflicting certainties. And that’s a very kind of unique Israeli form of ambivalence. Usually in the world when they say, I’m ambivalent, well, I’m not sure. My problem is that I am sure, but that my two certainties conflict.

So on the one hand, yes, I agree with you. There are red lines, there are moral red lines that the Jewish people at war cannot cross. Using hunger as a weapon, mass expulsion, those are our moral red lines. My other certainty is that after over a year and a half of war, this war cannot end in a victory or even an approximate victory of Hamas. Hamas, and I say this not because I believe that we need to exact revenge. For me, this war was never about revenge. It was always, as you said earlier, for me, and you know this, for me, this war was always about restoring Israeli deterrence.

But I would add another point here, which has become increasingly clear for me of what this war is about. And that is making sure that terrorism does not… making sure that terrorists are not granted immunity. In other words, what I think this war is about on the deepest level, and here I think it has significance for the world, is whether terrorists have come up with a strategy that effectively makes it impossible to defeat them. And that strategy is not just killing our civilians. Yes, they want to kill our civilians to demoralize us, to weaken us.

But I think the deeper strategy is to force us to kill, inadvertently kill, many of their civilians by hiding in hospitals and civilian neighborhoods. And that creates world revulsion against Israel and makes it impossible for us to defeat terrorism. If Hamas succeeds in that strategy, it will have implications for terrorism around the world.

And for me that’s a moral issue. In the 21st century with social media, with everything being transparent, how does a Western country, a democracy, defeat terrorism? And that’s, in the end, that’s what this war is about. And so that for me is no less a moral necessity than ensuring that
we don’t violate our moral red lines.

Donniel: Here too, we thought that we were gonna be deeply disagreeing with each other, but I don’t disagree with anything that you said.

Yossi: Yeah, I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said.

Donniel: No? You don’t disagree with anything that you said either.

Yossi: No, no, anything that you’ve said, because there’s something really important that you said earlier, which is that you and I share the same basic commitments to Israel’s security, to the moral health of the Jewish people. The question is, how do we prioritize? And when these two commitments seem to conflict, how do we manage that?

Donniel: How do we work it out?

Yossi: And so that’s where the nuance is, that’s where the push and pull comes into play.

Donniel: But I want to push it a little bit. see, if I look at this additional dimension that you added, not just the dimension of how do we maintain our moral core, how do we ensure that our enemies do not have the power to harm and to undermine our way of life, and you added this larger global issue of how do we fight terror. How do we make sure that terror doesn’t have immunity?

Let’s delve into that a little bit because I believe and I feel I don’t want to speak about moral concerns in a pragmatic way, in a utilitarian way, but it is precisely not Yair Golan who upset you so much, but it’s the way Israel is fighting this war without a moral conversation, which is actually giving these terrorists this sense of immunity.

Now, there are the October 8th morally corrupt individuals for whom, by definition, the powerless are just and the only weapon that the powerless could use is terror. And therefore, killing Jews, killing Israelis, by definition, Israel is guilty for October 7th and Hamas has a right to do so. And I remember

There was a very famous theologian who was a friend of our families who said, what do you want from,

Yossi: Who was that, Donniel?

Donniel: I don’t want to mention his name. I don’t want to mention his name intentionally because he is a blessed memory most of the time, except for he had a profound blindness on this issue. And it was a source of great struggle and conflict where he basically says, I don’t blame terrorists. don’t blame them. This was during the Second Intifada when they were blowing up buses and restaurants. He says, what else do you want them to do? They don’t have tanks. They can’t fight you in the battlefield. And so he basically gave them immunity to kill civilians and to use terror tactics.

There’s a whole intellectual. This man was brilliant. He was part of what has now become, let’s call it, the radical progressive October 8th, condemners of Israel. Let’s call them. There’s that group. We could leave them aside, but it is a serious intellectual challenge that we face. And that is how do we overcome the notion that power by definition is corrupt? And that the only ones who could actually use power are the powerless. That, by the way, is an oxymoron. There’s something that needs to be worked out. The powerless have access to power. The powerful don’t have access to power. So, and then who…

Yossi: And you know, the absurdity of that position. There was no more powerless people than the Jews. And so at what point, when the powerless assume power, at what point do they no longer have the legitimacy of the powerless to use power? You know, really?

Donniel: But Yossi, both you and I could agree, regardless of our parents and grandparents, we are very powerful people. We can’t play the, what was the moment?

Yossi: We are, we are. No, no, absolutely. I know, I agree with you on that, but I’m saying that this notion that there’s some kind of a statute of limitations, you know?

Donniel: There’s something obscene about that, but there is another side. I don’t want to, whether it was on November 15th, February 20th, May 9th. At what moment did Israel start turning the balance of the moral equation of October 7th? And I don’t know exactly at what stage, but I know that at this stage we are doing something different.

Yossi: Was there a moment for you, when you realized, can’t sign on to this anymore?

Donniel: It was in May, but I was bothered. I would have been able to sign in for longer if I felt Israelis were debating these questions. And if I felt our government cared about these questions, the lack of interest in humanitarian aid. I never felt comfortable accusing an individual soldier and saying, you did this and you were abusing your power. I never knew the fear, the dilemmas, the struggles that the individual soldier was facing in the battlefield. And I never tried to micromanage it. And that might be a moral failure on my part. I’m just describing. I never put our soldiers, not because I think the Israeli army is the most moral army in the world, all that. hate those sisma’ot, those slogans. You have to fight a just war justly.

But my feeling was is that on a policy level, we weren’t struggling with the moral questions. And that lack of struggle caused me to be distanced from this war very, very early on. And I never trusted the government to actually struggle with this because, for example, humanitarian aid was always when they pressured us to do it. It was never a Jewish agenda.

And even as Tal Becker, even when we ourselves actually initiated humanitarian aid, we hid it and didn’t share it publicly because it wouldn’t play well. But this stage I’m not ambivalent about. So…

Yossi: OK, so it’s interesting, Donniel, because I come, yeah. Yeah.

Donniel: But can I just add, Yossi, just one second. And I would like to pose to you that the greatest battle to, and when you speak about delegitimizing Israel, it’s not the Yair Golans and the Ehud Olmerts. I’m not saying they’re helpful, but what’s really hurting us is that when our friends are looking at us and saying, you don’t share our values anymore. You’re not struggling. What are you doing? You are now adopting policies. I’m not saying you’re killing babies for a hobby, but terrible things are happening day in and day out.

Can I quote to you one, I won’t even mention his name, a member of Knesset goes on television and says, one of the great achievements of Israel. Yesterday we killed a hundred Gazans and the world let us. This is one of the great achievements, this was a very recent statement of a

Yossi: Was this from a Knesset member from the Likud?

Donniel: No, this was a Knesset member from Ben Gvir. So he is, but he’s part of the coalition and he speaks, he says this on television with like this. like, could you imagine, like we’re reaching, when we talk about not giving terrorism a victory, part of what you do is you make sure that you are committed and focusing on these moral questions. That’s what really like is weakening us. So when now France and England and Canada, uniting together.

This war is not just a second stage of Israel’s war. We are moving into a different stage of world response where the condemnation is not from the moral idiots of October 8th, but mainstream people who supported us all along were angry, critiqued us. They’re basically saying to us, Yossi, I’ve had enough. And it wasn’t Yair Golan that did it. It was the actions of Israel and that’s why Yair Golan, I understood him. I hated his words, but I understood him.

Yossi: OK, you’re right. And you’re making an important distinction here, which is between those who demonize Israel and those of our friends who are troubled by our actions. We have no moral responsibility to engage with those who are trying to turn us into the world’s arch criminals, and who are trying to erase the Jewish narrative and the context for our actions. I have no moral responsibility to address those people’s concerns.

But I do have a moral imperative to address the concerns of our friends. And we need them. We need their engagement and we need their support and sometimes we need their criticism, especially when we as a society are so traumatized and broken that we can’t critique ourselves.

So there is that. I agree with you, Donniel, that we need to end this war. But I come at it from a different place. And this really goes back to the commitments that we share, but the different ways in which we prioritize those commitments.

My bottom line commitment is to ensure the ability of Israel to defend itself, our physical safety. And so all of the questions that I ask first go through that prism. Then I ask the question that you tend to ask first, which is how does this reflect on the moral integrity of the Jewish people? That’s my second question.

And my first question is, what is the position I need to take to ensure that the acute vulnerability which October 7th has restored to Israeli life and Jewish life around the world is manageable, that we have the proper tools to respond to that acute vulnerability? And here, when I go through the list of issues, it brings me to the place that you’re in, but again from a different direction. So for example, the fact that 70% of Israelis want to end this war if it means getting the hostages back, that for me, I interpret that in a strategic way.

And the need to prioritize the hostages over bringing Hamas down, is a need to ensure that Israeli society is able to maintain its minimal solidarity so that we will be able to adequately defend ourselves because we can only do that from a place of basic unity. And God forbid, allowing the hostages to die will break something fundamental in Israeli solidarity. So even on the hostages question, I’m approaching this first from a strategic point.

Donniel: I appreciate that. I see Israel rallying around the issue of hostages. And by the way, it’s just for the record, it’s not 70% anymore who are for stopping the war. It’s 68%. But you know, if we want to be accurate, let’s be accurate.

Yossi: Hahaha! Netanyahu is gaining momentum.

Donniel: No, it was always 68. It stayed. It’s still there. But the… Again, when we only look at the war through the prism of the hostages, and this is something I want to… where I differ from you, while I also see it through that prism, there are innocents who are being killed. Like a just war, it can’t just be an inner Jewish conversation about what is our moral responsibility to hostages. It’s like at some point, and like I’m almost tired of it, Yossi, and again, I don’t want to be disloyal, you know, because I also want to.

Yossi: I agree with you. No, no, listen. No, no, no, Donniel, I agree. I agree. But what I’m saying is that my first, my instinctive response is how does this play out strategically? the same thing, and here, now here, and it’s interesting, again, on the issue of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, I have to be honest. My first response is, how does this play out for us strategically? And if it means that we’re going to become a pariah state and we’re on our way to becoming a pariah, that has strategic consequences.

Donniel: I appreciate that. Yossi, could I?

Yossi: Now my second, yes, yes, but listen, Donniel, my second…

Donniel: Yossi, but there’s a real price that we pay, Yossi. I want, and this is part of what I’m feeling now. I had greater tolerance for that language during the first stage. There has to be a moment, Yossi, where the issue is not just how it plays out.

Yossi: Not just, I agree, not just, but I’m saying that this is my first commitment, my first commitment.

Donniel: And I’ll accept, you know, and it’s true, we can have different motivations. I don’t have to, I’m not looking for purity of motivations, you know, as long as, we all come things from different places. But I think, and I’m actually, I want to share with our audience a headline of a newspaper, which, with, in Israel, one of Israel’s most significant news sites, YNet. For the first time, Yossi, since the beginning, since October 7th, the headline on the website is, “When Babies Are Dying From Hunger: The Stories That the World Is Seeing from Gaza.” Haaretz would talk about this. Also, for a while, they weren’t active. And then their conversation changed.

This is mainstream Israeli newspaper… is telling a story and is telling Israelis, hello, I want you to know what’s happening. They’re talking about the hunger, they’re talking about kids being killed, they’re telling a story, something, whether Yair Golan activated it, the conversation, maybe it is the same issue that you raised, Britain, Canada and France beginning to talk, Trump beginning to tell us, we’re losing you. You’re pushing this too far. We need a different future. We need something else. Maybe it is the $2 trillion of Saudi, Qatari, Emirati money, whatever it is. The tide is changing and we’re in another place.

And I believe that it’s our job to be less utilitarian and the good has to be an obligation because to do the good is our obligation. And we have to fight a war of self-defense because it’s just. We have to fight a just war justly and that is hard.

But what happens when we’re not fighting a just war anymore, that conversation has to emerge and I’m beginning to sense it. It’s coming. It’s in Israel. This news site is one example. Criticisms of the war is another one. Fatigue of the reservists. Because when we’re called to a just war, there is no fatigue, you see. We’re called to a larger cause. Come. Are you going to say, hineni? Are you going to say, I am here? And right now, we are at another place.

And if I would just end my statement and give you the last word, in my book, I write about how, as you said, we are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. At this stage, we have to begin to start adding another chapter to the sum of the stories that we’re telling about ourselves. And it’s not just the stories of self-defense and practicality. There has to be another moral claim upon us as an end unto itself, because that’s at the end, without getting too rabbinic. That’s what God says to Abraham in chapter 18 of Genesis, I have elected you, selected you because you’re going to walk in the way of God by doing what is just and right. That can’t just be a verse in the Bible. That has to be a part of Israeli political life. Last words, Yossi.

Yossi: I think we’ve reached a moment in this war where we’re being torn apart by two non-negotiable elements of the Jewish story. The first is, as you very beautifully put it, the moral foundation of 4,000 years of the Jewish story. The second is our ability to defend ourselves both from those who are truly genocidal, who have a genocidal intent to destroy us, and by those around the world who are cheering them on and are undermining the historicity of our story.

And so we’re caught now, and I feel this is true for the Jewish people as a whole. You and I just spent a couple of weeks traveling around North America, meeting Jewish communities. And that’s my feeling about where we are. That’s where I am. And so yes, in the end I come out, we come out on the same side of this issue. But I feel overwhelmed by, as I said earlier, conflicting certainties. And this war just keeps, the knife just keeps turning deeper. And that’s where I feel I am, that’s where I feel we are.

Donniel: You know, thank you. You know, Yossi, if you know, for the sum of the stories we tell about it sells about ourselves, it doesn’t really matter the order of the chapters. It really doesn’t. You have to tell. But we have to tell the different stories. Oy. And I don’t want to keep on ending with an oy like that, some of our audience. We can’t pretend as if this is simple and easy times. We are really shaping now what story the Jewish people in Zion, and this is going to tell, and who’s going to be able to be a part of us and share those stories with us.

And as we end each time, today’s day 593, and part of our story and part of our moral obligation is to our families who are dying and in the tunnels of Gaza.

Yossi, this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, day 593. I needed to be with you this week, Yossi, so thank you.

Yossi: Me too, me too.

Donniel: And to all of our audience, be strong. Be strong and think about your chapters of your story.