The following is a transcript of Episode 86 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Donniel: Hello, I’m Donniel Hartman, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute. And with me is Yossi Klein Halevi, senior research fellow here at the Institute. And this is the Shalom Hartman Institute’s podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, the special edition, Israel at war. And today’s day 12. And our theme for today is the hospital, an issue that has engulfed our consciousness, for at least 12 and now 24 hours, and not just ours, Jews and Palestinians and people all over the world.
Yossi, I don’t know where you were when you first, on your feed or wherever it was, heard a hospital was hit. 500 are dead. And when I first heard it, I couldn’t breathe. I just couldn’t breathe. I so much know, so deep in my soul and in my moral fiber, that war, while war is hell, this is a just war. And I know that the complexity of Gaza is going to test us, and as we spent the whole last session on our moral red lines, it’s going to test us and we’re going to fail. But the minute I heard, I said, it’s over.
It’s not that Hamas stopped being a homicidal enemy, which we have a right to defend ourselves against. But if we can’t fight the war in Gaza without hitting a hospital, I said, it’s over. And then what are we going to do? And I had this, it was, I felt both a sense of moral failure. At the potential deaths of so many Palestinians and a deep frustration that we weren’t going to be able to do what we needed to do and what we have a moral right to do. And then as the reports started to filter in, I was breathing again.
Not that I was belittling the civilian deaths, the tragedy, the hospital shifted, it’s like, it’s a personification of the tragedy of the Palestinians in Gaza. And then we’ll get in a moment to the whole place of the press. But this was just this, this, we were able to continue to fight, but at the same time, I connected to the tragedy of Gaza, the tragedy of a society where their own missiles cause it, tragedy of a society where they lie and try to manipulate.
The hospital shook me very deeply. I still, now that I know that Israel didn’t do it, I’m a little more stable, but I’m still very shaken by it. Yossi. What happened to you? What was your journey?
Yossi: I was filtering this through, through several different identities, as a former journalist, and there my first question was, who is the source? And then looking at the news reports, the banner headline in the New York Times attributed to Hamas, to the Gaza Health Ministry, which is Hamas. So my initial journalistic instincts were, something’s wrong here. And what’s wrong is the way in which the media immediately jumped on this and turned this into banner headlines and we’ll unpack the media a little later. I’m just telling you the different ways in which I initially approached this. So that was one.
Donniel: Before you go on, I wish you would have called me because I went through hours of angst.
Yossi: So the second response, and I don’t know what was first or second really, you know, it’s all happening simultaneously, is as a citizen. And there, again, I don’t know if I’m retroactively assuming that this was my thought pattern or whether it really was at the time. But something like, well, if we did this deliberately, then it’s over. We can’t fight this war.
But what if this was an accidental atrocity? Does that mean we don’t have the right to press on against Hamas? And my conclusion was if it was accidental, you take a deep breath and you go on. So now that we have more clarity, I think we can really look at this, look at the question that, that we’re raising and expand on that, because sooner or later, we all know this, sooner or later, God forbid, but it’s likely that something like that is going to happen.
And we hope it will be accidental. We hope it doesn’t happen, but if it does, it should be accidental. And then my question to you, Donniel, is, does an accidental atrocity negate our right to fight Hamas?
Donniel: It’s a great question, Yossi. And I can tell you, I don’t know. This is what I was feeling. The enormity, just like, you know, we’ve lived through horrific terrorist attacks in the past. Do you remember that those two reservists who took a wrong turn? And I, what was it in, what, what was it? Into Jenin or Ramallah?
Yossi: Into Ramallah. And they were lynched in a police station,
Donniel: Ripped apart, and this person,
Yossi: Dipping his hands in his blood and triumphantly raising them.
Donniel: I remember, I, it’s, you know, there’s certain pictures that I’ll never forget. That’s one of them.
Yossi: That is imprinted on our whole generation. That was the picture of the Second Intifada.
Donniel: Exactly. I see it, like literally right now. I can literally see it. I see his hands. I see the red blood on his hands. I remember. So, there, barbarism, we’ve experienced before. Evil act we’ve experienced before. Magnitude counts. Magnitude changes things. And part of what happened on October on 10/7/23, wasn’t just barbarism, it was a magnitude of barbarism.
And I know that mistakes are going to happen. Listen, I was a tank commander in the first war in Lebanon. And I remember I had to give orders, fire, pick out targets. And the amount of times when you are clear at what you’re firing at, and when you’re not clear, it just, accidents are happening all the time, 25 percent of the casualties were self-inflicted casualties.
One of the most horrific battles of the war was tank commander school against tank officer school, who battled for hours. And so I remember functioning with this fog. So I know that we’re going to make mistakes. And I know we’re sometimes going to pick the wrong building. And sometimes, but if it was a hospital and 500 people in one moment, it might mean that we have to find a different way to solve the problem of Hamas. So, in other words, I appreciate the question, but it’s not self-evident to me that simply calling it an accident, maybe there has to be another way, because if this is the only way.
Yossi: Look, we’ve been here before, you know, in 1996, just before the elections, we had an operation in Lebanon and there was an errant shell and it hit a building where a large number of civilians were seeking refuge. If you remember, it was in Kafr Kanna. And a hundred people were killed, and Shimon Peres was the prime minister then, and he ordered an end to the operation.
It happened again in 2006. In Kafr Kanna. There was another errant shell. It was eerie, and it also ended. That wasn’t an operation, that was a war.
Donniel: Let me offer a distinction, tell me if you think it makes sense. I’m thinking about it, I don’t know if I’m, when there is an error in what could basically be a just war fought justly, that’s one thing. But what happens if this hospital almost personifies, if this is the price, because it’s not, you see in Lebanon, we were spread out, it happened and things are always going to happen and I accept accidents and human beings go to war and when human beings go to war, human beings are going to make mistakes and the critical distinction, you made it last time, it’s central to ethics in general and to morality of war in particular, intent is critical.
The difference between an army who’s fighting justly and terrorists are, are you targeting civilians or are you not? But if it is inevitable to this extent, I don’t know if that distinction, if you could claim I’m not targeting, if this is what would happen, 500 people in one day, assuming that’s the number, and they’re lying and that’s a whole other, I don’t put anything by them.
But if this is what it is, how do we proceed?
Yossi: But I think that for us to be within the boundaries of moral legitimacy, the question you’re asking must be asked. I’m not sure. Let’s put it this way, it’s not a rhetorical question, it’s a real question. If we don’t ask it, then we’re not fighting the war in a proper way.
Donniel: That could be the real tragedy. There’s some way, this hospital said to all of us, said to me, it put the tragedy of Gazans as a moral responsibility in front of my consciousness on a level, you know, and I accept, you know, we have to take down, we have to attack buildings, we’re going to have to attack, and there’s going to be civilian casualties when they’re embedded, but when do we, this is not like a moral red line, this is almost like when do we cross a line of understanding that we can’t fight the war this way.
And as a Jewish people, and that would be a tragedy, like here it is, we have an existential threat. And maybe we have to come up with a different methodology. I don’t know what it would be and that’s what’s so scary to me.
Yossi: You know, it’s interesting because my general approach to this war, so far has been, that as long as our intent is right, then we need to keep pushing on, regardless of the consequences, including to our own hostages. That’s what makes this war different. When we talk about Hamas human shields, it’s their people, it’s also our people. And I feel that we haven’t fully absorbed what happened to us on October 7th. We’re still in some sense in shock.
And this was an historic milestone, and I feel, if we talk about proportionality, I feel that, that this was such a major blow even to our long term existence here, the way a hostile region perceives us and our strength, that our response has to be proportional in a,
Donniel: I hear you. So for you, as we spoke the last time, the need is still, anyway, for me it was, but let’s just say that, thank God, you know, on the one hand, what are we thanking God for? Palestinians died in droves at the hands of their,
Yossi: Well, we don’t know, let’s slow that down for a moment.
Donniel: So let’s shift then to this and let me ask you this, let’s shift to, you know, we’ve been talking theoretically at the end about an event that as you’re saying, we don’t know how many and all this, let’s talk to the other side of this event.
I don’t know if you did spending time watching and waiting, when is the United, the head of the United Nations, the Secretary-General, when is he going to come out with an official retraction? I was watching the news sites, you know, now, New York Times, CNN, Fox, slowly they’re shifting, but for a while it was us. Everybody’s condemning us. Then, you know, Hamas says it was Israel. It was Israel. Israel says it was, it’s like, okay, this is, depends on who you ask. There’s two sides to a story, the fog of war.
Watching the place of the press in this story, seeing how quickly we moved from the noble dire, to the new evil one, to the evil du jour, it was also very, it was, it was stark, it was humbling, it was sad. Where do you, where does this take you? You’ve spent most of your life working with, thinking about, I don’t do this normally.
Yossi: Yeah, look, I go back to my years as a journalist, I don’t like media bashing. And I don’t like when, and this is very common in pro-Israel circles, to have contempt for journalism.
I know journalists. There are journalists who are malevolent. Most journalists are trying to do an honest job. They don’t always succeed. But these are people who’ve been drawn to the profession very often, not always, but many, by a sense of mission, by a love of the work to discover the truth.
Now, where I think many journalists have gone wrong, in recent years, is that what was once a profession dedicated to searching for truth has become a profession searching for justice. And truth is difficult enough to determine. To try to establish justice takes you into very dangerous ideological waters. And that is over and over again the pitfall of the most, of many well-intentioned journalists.
So I see that playing out in this sense that journalists have of truly wanting to be good, to be on the side of the good, to alert people. You know, you have a platform. Journalists almost are like clergy. You know, that’s this, this, they have this sense of, you know, I have to speak to my flock. Well, that’s a very dangerous attitude. And so I’m saying several things here, and I know I’m contradicting myself.
Because on the one hand, I love the profession, and I love journalists. I really do. And on the other hand, I feel something has gone wrong in the profession. And so what’s played out so dramatically with this terrible malpractice in the way this was reported was that instinct for justice, instinct for, I’ve got the pulpit, I have the world’s attention now, and they have to see what, what happened here.
Except that it didn’t happen. At least it didn’t happen the way they said it did, and we don’t even know how many casualties there were. Now, and this I’ll say further as a journalist, when I heard, immediately after the reports came out, Hamas initially said 300 people killed. Then they upped it to 500. Do you know how long it takes to count 300 bodies in a devastated building? But they immediately had the numbers and then it’s 500.
Today we now know that the building wasn’t hit at all. It was the parking lot that was hit. Were there casualties? I assume there were some. Was it 500? Was it 300? I wouldn’t bet on it.
Donniel: So they didn’t check then?
Yossi: They didn’t check.
Donniel: So this goes to the issue, what was, was it the pulpit of trying to advocate for justice? There was something, you know, you wrote about this too, in that phenomenal article you just wrote in the Times of Israel. In general, dying Jews is a good story. Imperialist killing Jews is even a better story. Whether it was justice, you know, I don’t want to dump and, you know, we’re gonna, there’s so many people supporting us and, and in a future podcast, we have to talk about the whole relationship of Israel with the world in this story. And there’s, the support is so dominant.
But at the same time, you know, we hear, whether it’s in European countries or among certain political positions or certain campuses, there are unions. It was, there was this very, even on Shabbos morning, we were condemned for what Hamas did to us.
We sensed, there is another side here. And it’s part of the reality which we fight with. We go to war. As long as we’re dying, we’re okay. The minute we start, when Jews have power and we use it, it was too quick. They should have said, check the sources. You know, I didn’t even, I was never a journalist. So, you know, when you say the simple thing, how long did it take Israel to count? We started with 200. It was days before we got up to be able to verify.
Yossi: We don’t even really have the full recknoing yet.
Donniel: You know, that’s the other side to this war. We’re morally strong, we’re united as a people, we’re facing tremendous unknown, and this hospital put the tragedy of the Palestinians at the forefront and also reminded us, don’t fall in love with sympathy, which comes when you die. Don’t fall in love with that.
Last thoughts, Yossi?
Yossi: There are two consequences, practical consequences of the distorted way in which the hospital was reported that worry me. The first is that when these kinds of distortions happen, Jews understandably but dangerously react with a kind of a cynicism and contempt that affects how we relate to casualty reports in general about Palestinians. It hardens us. It coarsens our language. And that’s one impact on us.
The second impact is on the Arab and Muslim worlds. There were demonstrations and violence all over the Muslim world. And in particular, what worries me, as for both of us and our families living in Jerusalem, this, God forbid, could have very immediate consequences. We live with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. I ride the light rail train here. We go through Palestinian neighborhoods, Jewish neighborhoods, and I now know that my Palestinian neighbors believe that not only did Israel bomb a hospital, but that we did it deliberately.
That has consequences for our safety. And so there’s a recklessness here that I would, I would urge journalists take a deep breath, think of the consequences. We’re all sitting on a tinderbox right now.
Donniel: You know, Yossi, it reminds us something, one of the key parts of our iEngage Torah that we developed over the years was this frustrating understanding that facts don’t shape opinions. People pick the facts that mirror their opinions. And the hospital is, how do you win that one? What picture could you show? What fact could you tell?
And in many ways, it’s the responsibility of journalists, just like it’s the responsibility of the Secretary General of the United Nations to stand up. And it’s not a fact, but the narrative needs to change. This was a, you know, we haven’t moved in yet. This was a scary day. This was a tragic day. This is a day that is also indicative of many things that are going to come. It’s a day that requires of us to do a lot of thinking about the war, about our enemy, about our position in the world, and what it is that we’re going to be facing in the days to come.
This is the Hartman Institute’s For Heaven’s Sake — Israel at War — Day 12.
