The following is a transcript of Episode 114 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yossi: Hi, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute, and this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, our special edition, Israel at War. And today is day 137, both of the war and 137 days of our hostages not being home. And our theme for today is what seems to be now a a larger move in which the victimhood of Israel and Jews on October 7th is coming to an end, doesn’t seem to have the weight anymore. And so we’re entitling it the end of victimhood, question mark.
Now, as Israelis, and I just came back from a trip around the East and West Coast in America, we’re perplexed, and maybe today we’ll try to be a guide for the perplexed. We don’t understand, how come October 7th seems to be forgotten, or its impact in justifying what Israel is doing, is it’s not powerful anymore.
And I’m not talking about the anti-Semites of the world, and even the radical anti-Zionists for whom anti-Zionism is a functions like anti-Semitism.
Yossi: That’s a that’s a very good distinction. It’s subtle and I like it.
Donniel: You noticed the move?
Yossi: Very good.
Donniel: There was a move there. I was doing a move because they’re different.
Yossi: But they’re different but not that different.
Donniel: Not that different. There’s something, there’s something about this hatred, it’s like,
Yossi: Obsessive.
Donniel: Obsessive, like something about it. But it’s, but I know it’s not anti-Semitic, because some of them are Jews, but they’re not anti-Semites. So there’s something, but I’m not talking about that group of people. That’s the group of people who said Israel was, there never was an October 7th, whether it never happened or never had any moral weight in thinking through this question.
Yossi: Or it never happened, it’s good that it happened, and we’re going to do it again.
Donniel: Yeah, that’s like, that’s Hamas, right? That’s another level. That’s, and again, there’s important distinctions, Yossi, like we have to hold ourselves. We have to hold our cynicism back. Yossi: It’s very hard. It’s hard to do.
Donniel: But they weren’t they didn’t celebrate. It’s just, that group I’m not talking about. But there is a large group of people in the world who are really our friends. They’re also the friends of Israel. And something is shifting when you hear, forget the Prime Minister of Ireland. Ireland has never been a friend of Jews.
But across the world, speaking about the fact that there needs to be a cease-fire now and and Netanyahu declares that if we don’t move into Raffiach or what’s known as Rafah, then we haven’t won the war and October 7th will never have been erased. Again, that’s a questionable issue, but it’s just, Ceasefire Now, the Biden administration, we never had a pro-Israel president standing, not just standing, he understood us. What moved us deeply, it wasn’t just the arms shipments. There was a feeling that you understood us. You understood our pain.
Yossi: And the courage to stand up to opposition within his own party before an election year.
Donniel: It was remarkable. It was just, there was a clarity. There was a moral clarity. And Blinken. When did we have a secretary of state where we felt, you understand us? All your trips schlepping to Israel over and over again, he doesn’t even get frequent flier miles. You know, he has, he flies on their plane. Schlepping over and over just to be here, to talk, to help us navigate what we should do.
And he comes and says, October 7th doesn’t give Israel the right to dehumanize Gazans. There’s something that’s shifted. And many of us or many Jews, many Israelis, are still very much in under the aura or the lens or the experience or the trauma of October seven. But around the world, empirically, its moral weight, its justification for the war has diminished.
And today I want us to talk together to try to understand this. Do we understand this? Is there a way to correct it? Are the things we’re doing wrong?
This victimhood dimension, which is so core to October 7th into the Israeli trauma, which instigated much of what we’ve done these last 137 days. It’s not moving people anymore. They’re they don’t see us that way. Are we still the victims, Yossi?
Yossi: I think we’re telling a psychologically incoherent story to the world and to ourselves, because on the one hand, October 7th was a relapse in the Jewish condition. On October 7th, we were defenseless victims. The army disappeared. We didn’t have a sovereign, functioning state, and we all felt it. And that’s the real trauma of October 7th. We were back in in this condition of pre-sovereignty, but that lasted for one day.
On October 8th, we made the decision and we began acting on it to undo October 7th, practically, and even more importantly psychologically. And we did the success of the last four months was that we have undone October 7th, but we haven’t absorbed that success.
Donniel: Can I just clarify, does that mean that from Yossi Klein Halevi perspective, who these last hundred and 37 days has said, over and again.
Yossi: It’s still October 7th for me.
Donniel: No, but that the greatest danger that we are facing is in in our deterrence?
Yossi: Yes.
Donniel: Do you feel we’ve we’ve reclaimed our deterrence in light of what you’ve just said?
Yossi: To a great extent.
Donniel: And you won’t go completely?
Yossi: No, no, not completely. But I’m I’m trying to internalize that. And I think that that, look, we have inflicted enormous losses on Hamas. We don’t yet know if we’ve come to the point of no return where Hamas can’t function any longer. We don’t know that. But I don’t know, if I were if I were Palestinian and looking at what happened since October 8th, I don’t think I would see October 7th as an unqualified victory anymore.
And so I think we need to internalize that we set out to undo October 7th. And to a large extent, we’ve succeeded. The condition of victimhood is antithetical to the Israeli ethos. We’ve discussed this before. It is everything that this state represents self-reliance, taking responsibility for your fate, everything that Zionism promised to do to the Jewish people, victimhood is the negation of that.
And that was part of the shock of October 7th. But this country made an enormously impressive comeback. Instead, comeback from the condition of victimhood. We haven’t owned it yet. And so when I say that we’re telling a psychologically incoherent story, we’re not doing this deliberately. It’s this isn’t a sleight of hand.
We ourselves are conflicted. There is part of us that knows we’re not victims and we are certainly not acting as victims. And you cannot possibly tell the story of post-October 7th in Gaza and portray Israel in any way as a victim. And that was our purpose. On the other hand, we haven’t internalized it. So we’re not coherent, even with ourselves.
Donniel: You know, in a recent lecture I gave, which moved me deeply. You know, I say that often, but, you know, we teach, and sometimes when we lecture, something comes out much more meaningful than we expected. You know, I’m like, oh, I can’t believe I thought of that. I want to think about that some more.
I spoke about the difference between what did we know on October 7th, like October 7th, October 8th, and now what is it, February 20 something? They’re not the same. They’re just not the same. And each day represents something very, very different and a different awareness and a different moral obligation. I never saw October 7th as a day of victimhood. I saw it as a day of defeat.
Yossi: No, I think that’s a much better framework.
Donniel: But I think we we thought that the way in which you justify why a war is through victimhood, a justification of wars, not that I was a victim, is that my life is endangered. Just war, I see you want to stop me. Go ahead.
Yossi: No, just that there’s there’s a really interesting distinction, I think, to make between victimhood and vulnerability.
Donniel: That’s right. Vulnerability. And even between victimhood and existential danger. And existential danger doesn’t have to be danger to the whole country. If part of my people are in profound existential danger, October 7th revealed that the myth of security was false, and that we have a right to go to war, not because you killed me. It’s not an eye for an eye. Just war is not an eye for an eye. But when we present this to the world, it was, we’re the victim, right?
So now we wanted sympathy. I don’t want sympathy. I don’t need your sympathy. Here it is. Okay. We Jews, we’re again the victim. And now you’re going to love us again. I don’t want that. There was a sense of moral clarity for me on October 8th, which grew out of the sense of the loss of October 8th, of October 7th.
Israel is insecure as long as somebody could perpetrate another October 7th. I have a right to fight, but it’s not, I’m a victim, because of what game played and we played it. And guess what happens. The minute you’re playing that game, how many died? You got 1,200? Oh, well, the minute you pass 1,200
Yossi: We could see that coming, we could really see that coming.
Donniel: So that was something very. So the trauma of October 7th led many people, including yourself in here, like even the Holocaust analogies, or this is the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. This is a reality that Israel is supposed to redeem us from victimhood. No.
Yossi: But Donniel, what you’re saying, the clarity that you’re offering works in retrospect. In real time, we weren’t manipulating these emotions. They were an instinctive response to the feeling of helplessness within the state of Israel. That was the shock. Now, I think we really need to start unpacking it.
And there’s there’s another level to this, which is what happened was we allowed ourselves to be tempted and this is post October 7th where a certain, not, I won’t call it manipulation, but a certain amount of calculation that did come in. We said, oh, we’re getting sympathy and it may not even have been conscious. Finally, Israel is getting some sympathy and we allowed ourselves to be drawn into a category in which we can’t win. And that’s the category of victim victim versus victimizer. We thought, oh, finally, we’ve been accused of being the victimizer for so long now we can play the victim.
And it lasted for about five days. We we own that. And in large parts of public opinion, we didn’t own it even for one day. But what was false about that is that the whole category of victim versus victimizer doesn’t work in trying to understand the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This is about so many overlapping and convoluted categories.
And victim and victimizer is one piece of this. But the notion that one side or the other is the absolute victim and the other is the absolute victimizer is simply a distortion of a word we keep using, which is of a complexity, of an unbearably relentless complexity.
Donniel: You know, Yossi, I agree with you that some of it wasn’t intentional. Maybe that’s another way, when we look at the different dates, October 7th, October 8th, February 20 something, we also have to go November 25th, December 13th. At different stages, we shifted from a trauma to calculation/manipulation.
You know, it’s from this conversation that I’m actually, it’s doing what I hoped it would do for me, because I’m looking to try to understand something. And you’ve been very helpful. We used victimization as a justification for the war, but we can never win the victimization battle, the victimization sweepstakes.
Yossi: Nor do we want to.
Donniel: Yeah, we did. You know, part of us, and this is what you said, when you were saying it, I really appreciated it. We just like, we were tired. You know, it’s exhausting being Goliath. Like the world looks at you and they respect you, but they don’t like you, You know, like Netanyahu wants to strut and be the Goliath. But, you know, it didn’t feel good, because the reality is Palestinians are victims. They might be victims of their own creation.
Yossi: Of their own leadership.
Donniel: Of their own leadership. I think, yes, civilians in Gaza are victims. It’s true the 1,200 people who were killed and the hostages were victims, are victims. But Israel, Jews, Israelis, we’re not victims.
Yossi: That was the whole point of Zionism.
Donniel: Of Zionism. There’s a difference between the victims of that day. And it might sound like I’m splitting hairs, but it’s not. The hostages are victims. The people who were massacred were victims, the women who were raped, people who were assaulted. They were victims. The Jewish people weren’t victims. Israel is not a victim. Gaza is.
And so when we are still trying to justify Gaza by our victim, of course we’re going to lose. And you want to know something else? We should.
Yossi: That’s right.
Donniel: When you have 2 million Gazans, at the end of the day, whether they supported Hamas or didn’t, it doesn’t matter. I don’t buy, oh, because you support, people support, there still is a distinction between combatants and noncombatants, Gazan civilians today are victims. They’re victims of a war. That doesn’t mean Hamas are victims. But we were never there.
But we played a card. And instead of speaking in terms of just war. Instead of saying, look how much we suffered. A just war is a war of self-defense. Has a war of self-defense ended when Hamas is still in power? That’s a separate claim than to say one second, have you seen pictures yet? Let me take you to another trip. You know, it’s like almost could we take the world press every three weeks to another trip to the Gaza envelope? Could I take you one more time? Could I show you hostage pictures one more time?
And we also, I think, appreciated that there was no moral confusion there. When you’re the victim, you don’t have to make a moral, it’s like, the victimhood makes you morally righteous. It’s sympathy. You don’t have to compete. You’re nothing of the victim. And we stopped and I understand it on October 7th, I understand it on October 8th, and I understand it on November 15th. But by November 18th, when we were we were anachronistic. Like we were still in a place, and the world looked at us and said, nope.
Yossi: You just said that we wanted sympathy. And I think that’s the key. We didn’t want to be victims, we wanted sympathy, and we allowed ourselves to get into trouble is that we blurred the distinction between sympathy and I think we deserve, I think our opposition to this. They deserve sympathy. We’re fighting a particularly lethal form of radical Islamism. And, again, we allowed ourselves to get tempted by the victimhood piece.
There’s another element here about where we’ve gone wrong in terms of presenting what I consider to be a compelling moral case. And that is we don’t have the leadership to present it. We don’t have a morally credible leadership. This government is the gift that keeps on giving.
Donniel: Or the gift that keeps on taking.
Yossi: Yeah, you know, and and if we thought that they were a danger before October 7th, and they were, they were a danger to Israeli democracy, today, they’re a strategic danger. They’re a danger to our moral credibility at precisely the moment when we need it most.
Donniel: So could we even make a further distinction? You went from victimhood to sympathy. I want to go from sympathy to justification.
Yossi: To understanding.
Donniel: To just moral, just moral understanding. I don’t even want sympathy. But that means we have to compete in a moral conversation. You don’t just show a picture, but when you want to compete in a moral conversation, your point about the government is it’s not just that Netanyahu is not sympathetic. It’s that he has led, and his government in particular, a policy completely devoid of moral discourse, assumption of moral righteousness when it comes to the moral righteousness of our right to self-defense, it’s infinite, but a moral conversation towards others, those words almost never, he just said maybe one sentence the other night, but they almost never
Yossi: No, no, no. He’s, it’s not part of his worldview.
Donniel: So you don’t get sympathy from him. But the real battle now is the question of what’s moral righteousness? What is your moral justifications? That means you have to talk the moral talk. That means you have to expose, engage in a moral conversation, including the rights of Palestinians. But our government, when you don’t do that, there’s no place.
Yossi: You know, in my writing, I’ve been trying to make a distinction between the people of Israel and the government. And Bernie Sanders, not long ago, denounced what he called Netanyahu’s war. And I’ve been critiquing that since, saying, this is not Netanyahu’s war, this is the war of the people of Israel. Netanyahu is irrelevant.
The truth is, no, he’s not irrelevant. He is the head of the democratically elected government. Now, he wouldn’t be reelected today, but I understand people abroad who say, what kind of a distinction are you making between the electorate and its elected government? And the tragedy for Israel is that we have the least morally credible government in our history.
Donniel: And no public relations. You know, again, as I come back from North America, everybody is just in constant angst at Israel’s public relations as if there was another line, you know? What is it that we could say? This notion of losing the public relations war, Netanyahu will always lose it because public relations is never it’s never just a sentence. It’s not a spin. Good public relations is built on policy. And so when your public relations is sympathy.
Yossi: And on your own credibility.
Donniel: Right, your moral credibility. What you admit, it’s openness, transparency. It’s not as if you have this one little line that you’re going to say and then everybody say, oh my God, I didn’t see.
Yossi: But I have to tell you, Donniel, I have one of those lines.
Donniel: You do?
Yossi: I have a frustration on our inability to explain ourselves.
Donniel: So Yossi, I want to tell you, as we know, this podcast is really our own therapy. So if you have a frustration, Yossi, please share.
Yossi: I do. It’s enormous. The Frustration is.
Donniel: Lean back, Yossi.
Yossi: Maybe I could lie down.
The frustration is that we have allowed the narrative to be over, over the casualties, to be taken from us and over and over again. You see in the media.
Donniel: What do you mean narrative of casualties?
Yossi: I mean the casualties of how many innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza. And we’ve allowed that narrative to be framed by Hamas, which is 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children. I just read that line in the in The New York Times today by one of their columnists, and it recurs.
Donniel: All the time.
Yossi: But if you look at at what is what the numbers actually are, 12,000 of the 30,000, and let’s assume it’s 30,000. Let’s not argue with Hamas. 12,000 of the 30,000 are Hamas fighters. The ratio between civilians and fighters is well within the norm of other conflicts. Some say that we’re actually doing much better than most comparable conflicts.
Donniel: Can I just ask, because I don’t understand. What do you mean in the norm of conflicts? So if it’s 12,000, that means what? There’s 2 to 1 civilians?
Yossi: Let’s say what, 1.5 civilians to one combatant, or two civilians to one combatant. Now, you can’t win that argument for two reasons. First of all, as soon as you start getting into the numbers, you sound petty and insensitive.
Donniel: That’s what I wanted to tell you. As you’re talking,I don’t even know what to do with what you say.
Yossi: But the point, the reason that that’s an important argument is because the way that it’s being used against us is that this war exceeds anything, any norm that we’re used to in the 21st century. That’s how it’s being framed.
Donniel: That’s the genocide argument.
Yossi: And it’s not true. It’s absolutely not true. And yet we don’t have an effective way to argue for two reasons. One is for exactly what just played out now between us. Oh, you’re starting your becoming an accountant of misery. Right.
Donniel: I think you used the term, it’s well within the norm, right. I’m like, I want, no, I actually wanted to scream.
Yossi: Yes. Yes. And I think that that’s a morally understandable response. But not when we are being put into a unique category of evil of the worst war in human history. And we have the right to say, well, wait a minute, this isn’t the only war in the 21st century. Let’s look at the other wars.
But the deeper reason why I think we can’t make that case, it’s again, because we don’t have a morally credible leadership. Imagine if we had a different government. Imagine if Benny Gantz stood up and said, my heart breaks for the agony in Gaza. And he you could do it. Can you imagine Netanyahu saying those words? My heart breaks for the agony in Gaza.
But when you try to portray Israel and the way we’re conducting this war as somehow uniquely deviating from the norms of a just war, this is where we have to draw the line.
Donniel: I hear you. I hear your frustration.
Yossi: So this is it.
Donniel: So, first of all, Yossi, do you feel heard?
Yossi: I do, but it hasn’t happened.
Donniel: So first, I hope you feel heard. And I want to validate your feelings. There’s no way. Yes. And you know why? Because it goes back to what we said at the beginning. We were trying to play the victimhood and sympathy cards. And when you’re doing that, when you start doing these calculations, you don’t sound very sympathetic. You don’t sound like a victim. You sound almost evil. Like, you know, okay, people thought war’s much less. I’m not saying, chas v’shalom, that you’re evil. But if you think, if you just think about it for a second. It’s only a 2 to 1 ratio.
Yossi: There’s no way to respond to those accusations.
Donniel: But when you, from the beginning, it wasn’t about sympathy and it wasn’t about victimhood. And the claim of civilian casualties in Gaza is that Gazans are victims. And could we, as Jews and as Israelis, just for one moment say, yes, you are victims. You are. This is a just war. You are victims. And when you say that, by the way, it’s not just our prime minister saying giving a speech. This is something that I’ve said here and I’ve written about and I’m talking all over the place, that I’m aggravating.
Yossi: This is your frustration.
Donniel: This is my frustration when I’m speaking about, hello, let’s do something about it. If Gazans are victims, and we could actually say that, and Israelis have to come to a place where they give up the victimhood card, I’m not going to war because I’m a victim. I’m going to war because I am a sovereign country with a right to live and a right to defend myself.
You are the victims. But if you are the victims, what are my moral responsibilities to you? How do I take care of you? What are the things that I do? But all of that, these numbers, this number game, was to say to the world, Israel presents itself as the victims. They’re not. And the truth is, that’s that’s that’s that’s a much more winnable argument.
And in that one, when we tried, when we give your argument. it just, that doesn’t sound like a victim. That sounds like someone unbelievably powerful, someone with tremendous rates, sitting and calculating and congratulating themselves. But if that wasn’t our ploy from the beginning or if we accept their victimhood,
Yossi: So what do we do now?
Donniel: It’s, I don’t know. I think we lost that one, Yossi. And I think one of the realities that we have to think about is that we have alienated now a lot of the world. Not our enemies. We’ve also alienated our friends. And what we do is probably something that we have to talk about in a future podcast.
But one thing that’s clear, it’s not in our power to declare the end of this government and to change our Prime Minister. We’re going to have to talk about how those changes take place. But one of the things we learned in Israel, before October 6th, is the power of the people, the power of the people to represent Israel independent of the government, that the prime minister doesn’t define a country.
And part of what we have to do is that educators, we have to start moving Israelis to a different conversation and when Israelis will talk, maybe we’ll never learn who win this, who really was killed or not. But we have to leave that. It may be that you have to just let that be. It really doesn’t matter. Because if it’s 2 to 1, 10 to 1, if it was, if it’s 20,000 civilians or instead of 30, it’s like, really, this is where the moral tipping ground? We give that up.
But when we start speaking a moral language, which doesn’t only apply to our rights but also applies to the rights of others, then there’s a possibility of our friends reclaiming a conversation with us. Right now they’re looking at us and saying, the Israel that I had a relationship with all along is an Israel that I respected. It’s an Israel that shared my Western values, my Judeo-Christian values, Judeo-Christian-Muslim values. But you’ve been talking to me about victimhood. Let’s run out. We have to change the change the, to use an old analogy, turn over the record. Last thoughts, Yossi?
Yossi: As a result of this conversation, what occurs to me is that the emotional experience that so many of us went through, I went through, and many other Israelis on October 7th of this panic of lapsing into the condition of Jewish powerlessness resulted in an abdication of the responsibility of power.
Donniel: Say that again, because I have to tell you from my perspective, this whole podcast is worth that one line. Say it again.
Yossi: I don’t remember it.
Donniel: You’ve gotta, you’ve got to reclaim it. It’s very, very powerful.
Yossi: The emotional experience.
Donniel: I have it word for word. The lapse into Jewish, into powerlessness, created an abdication of the responsibilities of Jewish power.
Yossi: Right. Right. And what we need to do now, and this is what I’m hearing from you. is that our challenge is to reclaim the moral responsibilities of power. while affirming the necessity for power, and to reclaim the seriousness of wielding power.
Donniel: Really nice to be with you, Yossi. Thank you.
Yossi: Such a pleasure.
Donniel: It’s really a pleasure. Friends, this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at war, Day 137. You can now sponsor an episode of For Heaven’s Sake Israel at War.
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