Subscribe on all major platforms

About

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.

Under the Volcanoes 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 from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, day 298. And our theme for today is entitled Under the Volcanoes.

Yossi, there’s been so many volcanoes, these last, 298 days, we’re dodging and we’re dealing with challenge and crisis and dilemma after dilemma after dilemma. But it seems that this week is, you know, despite how strange as it might sound, there was something very different this week. And our society is living under these two dual potential volcanoes. One has started to erupt and one is on the verge, or maybe it also has erupted. One volcano is the north, Hezbollah, the horrific attack against the Israeli Druze children who were playing in a soccer field. 12 children were killed.

And there’s this imminent Israeli response, possibly by the time our audience hears this, the response will already have happened. And we don’t know exactly how the response is going to change the nature of our life and what’s happening here. Is it going to be significant but measured? Is there any notion of what’s measured? Is it itself gonna lead to, as inevitably happens, mistakes and bombs that hit sometimes in the wrong places? Is it gonna cause something more dramatic on Hezbollah? Is everything gonna spiral out of control?

We’re sitting here with this Hezbollah story sitting on us and wondering how it’s going to change our life. It’s always been in the background, but it seems to have begun to, I don’t know if volcanoes percolate, I don’t know what they do, but they do something.

Yossi: Before they erupt, they’re busy.

Donniel: They’re busy. Percolating is not bad. And then, you know, so that’s there and it’s sitting in a deep existential way wondering, you know, like, I don’t know, so many of us months ago filled up storages with water and tuna and canned goods and all the stuff when the war was

Yossi: Oh, we still, we’ve kept that going straight through. We are, you’ve been eating your supplies.

Donniel: I’ve been eating, I’m coming to you, Yossi. Like, I’m wondering whether this is the time.

Yossi: We’re ready, we’re ready.

Donniel: You know, because the army said, we should all be ready for 72 hours, a week, two weeks. So we all had two weeks of stuff. And, you know, I’m like sitting nervous because I’ve really been enjoying that tuna fish. And my wife, my wife from the beginning, Adina, from the beginning was kvetching, what, are you insane? What do we have going on here? Anyway, I might have to go stock up.

But it’s come back because, there’s another level of preparedness and of worry, of, we’re yet again on the brink of, but we’re always on these brinks. But there’s another brink that I have to tell you, Yossi, you know, after the first few weeks of the war, I adjusted. I adjusted and I feel like I’ve been pretty, I’ve been pretty strong. You know, I’ve been punched, but I’ve been able to flex and handle most of the punches, more or less. People would ask me, how are you? And I could answer, fine, thank you, without too much internal gazing.

But yesterday, something punched me and my defense systems weren’t ready. And it’s another volcano, which you and I have been speaking about, many of us saw it, you especially, already last year with the judicial reform. But yesterday, the military police and the JAG authorities arrested nine soldiers who are serving as guards in the prisons Sdei Teiman because a Hamas terrorist was raped, sodomized, and severely so, and they opened up an investigation and they arrested nine people.

Now, I’m assuming innocence until proven guilty, I have no idea, but that the army has to investigate this is self-evident. But the minute it was announced that the army is investigating hundreds, not thousands, a couple of hundred Israeli citizens, but more significantly, ministers in the government and members of Knesset, including of the Likud party, rushed down to Steteman to break in, literally breaking in, and the army obviously didn’t want to shoot, breaking into the army base and afterwards, breaking into the base where these soldiers were arrested, critiquing the horrific act of the army who instead of supporting our soldiers is trying to arrest them.

Yossi, it just hit me like, really? Really? Maybe, instead of me describing, why don’t you describe what you think just happened? And then I feel like I have to talk, we have to talk about this before we could talk about Hezbollah, because for this, I don’t have anything stored in my cupboard. I don’t have the same protection system. Something’s going wrong here, Yossi.

Yossi: You know, to get back for a moment to how you described our situation today, we’re experiencing a convergence of external and internal threat, existential threats on both fronts. That’s how I experienced what happened with this break-in to an army base. As in its way, no less a threat to our ability to remain here, to remain in this land, to maintain our sovereignty, our national cohesiveness. Because what happened was crossing, I mean, we’ve crossed so many red lines since this government came to power. But this, I think, shocked even those of us who thought we couldn’t be shocked anymore. When you break in, when you violate the untouchability of a military base, and as you put it, led by a minister and Knesset members from the coalition, and including, by the way, many people who are armed, openly armed, breaking into an army base, that’s an insurrection. That’s civil war. On the most basic level, it is the destruction of our last consensus institution.

And you know, Donniel, it began with this government’s assault on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. And eventually, it moved to an assault on the legitimacy of the army itself. The army has no right to investigate soldiers for alleged crimes that violate every IDF norm, the army has no right to hold these people in a prison on an army base, and ultimately the army has no right to protect the integrity of its space from civilians barging in, breaking down the gates, beating soldiers.

Donniel: What were they doing, Yossi? What is the protest, as you understand it?

Yossi: They were establishing a hierarchy of values. And in the name of defending the soldiers, they’re tearing apart the army. They’re tearing apart the basis of the social solidarity that makes the army possible. And they’re saying that for us, for the hard right, the value is making sure that the judiciary has no claim on soldiers’ behavior. The army has to be completely off-limits to moral restraint. That’s the message.

And in doing so, they’re threatening, first of all, physically, they’re threatening the army’s ability to defend its bases, and they’re destroying the bases for our solidarity. If this becomes the norm in the army, if the army is not allowed to investigate this kind of moral collapse, liberal Israelis are going to stop serving. People will not serve in Ben-Gvir’s army. What he’s trying to do to the army is what he’s already doing to the police. He is erasing all moral limits, and now those norms, or the absence of those norms, that mob was trying to impose on the idea.

Donniel: I know it’s a few minutes late, but to our audience, this podcast, Yossi, you and I and the whole Hartman Institute, our vision of love of Israel does not entail whitewashing and telling the good story. Let me tell the good story so that you could be happy. My father used to, alav hashalom, blessed memory, to say Israel’s not a nachas machine. Israel’s not what’s supposed to make you feel nachas, means makes you supposed to feel good.

But for us, Zionism and love of Israel is about a real partnership in what this country is about. That’s what it’s about. It’s about looking at the good, looking at the challenging, looking at the bad, and understanding where we are. And like every week, we have no choice. This has had a profound impact on our experience as Israelis right now. And so I apologize. We are looking at a deep underbelly of Israeli society. Now, I don’t want to exaggerate. It’s not huge. It wasn’t everybody. But what’s different is that this is at the heart of the coalition.

Yossi: Exactly, exactly. That’s the point.

Donniel: And what makes it even, it’s at the heartm see, what you really are seeing now is you all, every society has fringes. Every society has nutcases. Every society has evil people. Every society has people who are beyond the red lines. And that’s part of our story. And it’s every society and we’re not exempt from it. But part of what’s happened is that some of these, I don’t even know what name to call them, are, they’re not at the fringe. This is the deep consequence of bringing Smotrich and Ben Gvir to the heart of the government. And it’s not just Ben Gvir and Smotrich. They’re normalizing an ideology. They’re normalizing it. There’s members of the Likud party. Even one of the ministers of the Likud turned to this other minister and said, which party are you in? Are you the Likud party? Is it even coherent?

Yossi: And Donniel, look at the Likud ministers who supported the, if not the break-in, didn’t condemn it, but supported the argument of the rioters, which is that the army should not be putting on trial or even investigating the alleged crimes.

Donniel: You know where you see it also is, today, Netanyahu condemned it. He condemned it finally, didn’t condemn it yesterday. Yesterday he didn’t condemn it, he just called for law and order. You look at Bennett, the former prime minister, he condemned it unequivocally, it was clear. Today at the cabinet meeting, in the cabinet, not publicly, he condemns it, but Netanyahu then has the chutzpah, he then compares this to the lawlessness of the demonstrations for freeing the hostages who are blocking the highways.

So like here, here you have, I agree, demonstrations should be in accordance with the law in accordance with their permits, but okay. So you blocked some streets. You’re comparing blocking streets to invading military bases? You’re comparing blocking streets to somebody who’s saying that soldiers who at least allegedly are sodomizing a Nukhba terrorist, they’re immune? The attackers you are trying to put on trial are heroes? There is a moral corruption, a moral vacuousness, like even Smotrich, like people are saying, you know, I condemn the fact that you invaded the bases, but… The minute you do that “but,” is there ever a time when there isn’t a “but” that we should be investigating soldiers who potentially raped somebody? Really?

Yossi: It means when you erase the most minimal ethical norms and then invade an army base, really what you’re saying is there are no red lines anymore. And, Donniel, I have to tell you, I am really worried about the future here, because we have a government that is ready to implicitly justify invading an army base, that has no, there’s no restraint anymore.

Donniel: Even if there’s no moral voice, Netanyahu can’t stand up. Literally, he’s using this as a partisan conversation. So we now have the two extremes. The hundreds of thousands who are demonstrating because they believe that Israel has a moral responsibility to return the hostages, but since they’re not part of his camp, they’re on one extreme. And the other extreme are the couple of hundred, but people based within also the mainstream coalition, the Likud party and the government. These are the two extremes, each one, these are comparable? When, part of moral corruption is when you remove any ability to make moral distinctions. Are we really want to be such a people?

Yossi: What’s happened on the hard right is that it has taken on the attributes of our enemies. And we saw it for years in the coarsening of theological discourse on the hard religious right, which really more and more resembled a kind of Jewish version of jihadism, where war and God’s main identity, how God works in the world, is through war and vengeance. And this is something really that Meir Kahane helped succeed to mainstream within parts of religious Zionism.

So now, I mean, look at the irony here, Donniel. You have a group of soldiers who are being accused of doing what Hamas did to us. Okay, they did it in revenge, they did it in the name of the Jewish honor. And this is what it’s come to. And never mind these nine soldiers, and I really hope they’re innocent, but the fact that for the rioters and for the leaders of the hard right and much of the mainstream right today, it almost doesn’t matter if they’re innocent or guilty. And so the normalization of behavior which we rightly detest in our enemies is being absorbed by that part of the Israeli public that claims to be most out there in defending who we are as a people.

Donniel: You know, the one small difference between you and I is that I’m not afraid about the future. But I am upset. I’m not afraid. There is going to be elections. And I do believe this will be corrected. But there is no doubt that part of the reason why these demonstrators ran is that they hoped to also increase their support for their side. This is the sides, right? We have “free the hostages” and “our army will do no bad.” Like our love of Israel, this is fascism par excellence. But it also does pay.

There is another context to why the army is being proactive about these things right now. The ICC and the ICJ are both saying that Israel, we need to intervene because the Israeli judiciary system is not working. You aren’t persecuting crimes, you’re not doing this. And as a result, we are going to issue a warrant, arrest warrants against the prime minister and the minister of defense and the chief of staff. And the answer always is, what are you talking about? We have a functioning judiciary. You only come into play when you believe there isn’t a functioning judiciary, when there isn’t a rule of law. We are persecuting our criminals. If Israel did something wrong in the war, we are, we’re responsible.

And this prison, which was known as a problematic prison and the Supreme Court already warned, and there’s issues going on, here it is, we want to make sure that the fundamental basic rights, even of the most heinous terrorists, are still being protected. And let’s remember that it is Minister Ben Gvir who said, why are there so many people here? Why aren’t we killing them beforehand? These are the things that are undermining not only the moral fiber of Israel, but the security of the State of Israel.

Yossi: See, this is exactly what the far-right doesn’t understand. know, Ben Gvir calls his party Jewish power. The far-right has a childish understanding of power. For the far-right, power is expressed only at its endpoint, which is military force. But in order to have effective military force, you need to have a whole nexus in place, which includes a healthy economy in relationship with the global economy. It includes having access to American weapons, which means maintaining our moral credibility with our friends. It includes maintaining the support of the diaspora. Military force is the endpoint, but,

Donniel: It’s only one part of our power.

Yossi: Yes, and what the far right would do is create the conditions that would endanger all of that web of soft power that enables the hard power to be effective.

Donniel: You know, and for our audience, it just pays to add also that for some of those who support it, and the majority of them come from the far right within the religious-Zionist community, they have another vision of Israel’s power and that Israeli power is ultimately connected to God’s power. And they believe that it is through conflict and through the magnifying of Jewish national consciousness that ultimately will bring about God’s return to history. Now there’s a parallel between certain parts of the evangelical community and the far right of the religious-Zionist community. Both work in apocalyptic messianic categories. They have different outcomes, but for some of them, they’re this notion, morality, worrying about soft power, worrying about our allies around the world. That’s the opposite. That’s weakness. True strength is going to come from God.

I just, my challenge as a rabbi and as a Jew is which God are you worshiping? Which God do you think is going to sit here and say, yes, my lovely children of Israel, yes, sodomize away. Like this is what’s going to bring God to redeem Israel?!

It is so horrific. It is… I’m embarrassed. I’m ashamed. And we have to do better. We will do better. But there is no doubt that this was a low point. You know, I don’t want to speak in… Is it hyperbole? What is it?

Yossi: Hyperbole.

Donniel: Hyperbole. You made Aliyah later than I did, so some of my English is, you got some of the words better. Hyperbole. But I have to tell you, October 7th hit me very hard. The weeks after also. This is, way, way up there since October 7th. Serious, serious concern.

Yossi: I’m experiencing this as as a threat to our viability. And I appreciate your moral outrage and I share it. But this, what happened at the army bases hits me in another place as well. And that is in this place of this deep anxiety that I’ve had since this government came in for our long-term viability. The mob rushing the gates of two army bases is a direct threat to the authority of the IDF, to the authority of the chief of staff. And they were very clear about that. The chief of staff has no authority over the soldiers.

And so in Israel, we have a concept called mamlachtiyut. Mamlachtiyut is a very hard term to translate into English. I would call it something like the dignity of the state, protecting the integrity and dignity of the state and its institutions. The far right does not recognize the dignity and the integrity of the state. This government, and it’s not only the far right, I include the ultra-Orthodox, I include Netanyahu, this government is our first anti-mamlachti government, a government that has trampled on our institutions, that doesn’t respect the dignity of the state.

Donniel: You know, Yossi, it’s interesting on this point. Actually, one of the ultra-Orthodox ministers in the government is the one who stood up and said to these demonstrators, after your primaries, stop politicizing, we actually have an army and a country to protect. Make sure that you don’t destroy it all. So they actually had some recognition that this went too

Yossi: Unbelievable. When the army has to be defended politically by an ultra-Orthodox minister, that tells you where we are. Now, what’s also interesting is that the guy who led the charge at the army base, at Zvi Sukkot, is Ben Gvir’s closest advisor, a Knesset member as well, who did not do the army. This, when I talk about the assault on mamlachtiyut, for me what this means is that we now have a post-Zionist government. And there’s an irony here, because this is the ultra-nationalist government. This is the most nationalist government we’ve ever had. But ideologically, if you don’t respect the institutions of the state, you really are moving into the ultra-Orthodox camp, where there’s always a higher value than the dignity of the state.

Donniel: You know, Yossi, it’s just even here, it was actually an ultra-Orthodox minister from the Shas party who turned to the supporters of the demonstrations and said to them, he actually, he had more of a Zionist instinct when he said to them, be careful after you continue, after you complete your primaries, you know, because now you’re really politicking, now you’re doing stuff for your, for the next election, says, actually make sure there’s still a country that we could still have.

But you know, we called this podcast under the volcanoes, you know, within the plural, you know, we could talk about this continuously. There’s so many levels of it. And it’s just, you know, this is an issue, whether it’s existentially dangerous, whether it’s morally challenging, whether it’s just a bad place, whether it’s part of what happens when war occurs. It just shuts down so many of your moral sensibilities and even those who have them, it just becomes popular to live in an us-them universe. And it’s one of the great challenges of times of war. It’s one of the great challenges.

But there’s another challenge and we’re not going to do this in depth. Well, we don’t know what the response is going to be, but Hezbollah in the North, is this the time in your mind for an all-out war? Was this the trigger we were waiting for? Is this the time to, even ostensibly if we could take out, is this the time to try Yossi? Or is this the time to be more moderate and measured?

Yossi: No, no, I’ll go even further and say that the whole mindset that really is holding us in its grip now of retaliation is wrong. When you’re in a war, you don’t do tit for tat. You have a strategy and you follow that strategy. We don’t have a long-term strategy. It’s so clear.

Donniel: With Hezbollah in the north. We have nothing.

Yossi: No. We don’t have a long-term strategy with Gaza either.

Donniel: Oh, by the way, and you could see it in the north. We, we, we take out some operatives. They bomb. It’s like this back and forth, each side.

Yossi: It’s a war of attrition rather than a real war. And I’m not interested in fighting a war of attrition because we have close to 100,000 Israelis who’ve had to leave their homes in the north. This is the first time in Israeli history when we have a security zone on our side of the border rather than on their side of the border. And so this situation is untenable. It is going to require pushing Hezbollah significantly back. And that means war. We’re not ready to fight that war yet. Everyone here knows it. Reservists are at their limit. You have people who’ve been serving in the army since October 8th. And we’re not ready yet to have the next phase of this war.

And we also need to shore up the consensus in Israeli society. How do you go to war when army bases are being stormed by part of your own people? So we are in no condition to fight what will almost certainly be the worst war in Israel’s history. Hezbollah has close to 200,000 missiles and rockets aimed at our home front. We’ve never experienced anything like the potential devastation that this next war will bring. But again, as someone who believes we have no choice but to fight it, we need to do this strategically, judiciously, and choose our time and not allow Hezbollah provocations to determine how we fight this war.

Donniel: You know, is it okay if I agree with I know both of us, we’ve been echoing each other today and that’s, it’s maybe, you know, when the volcanoes are there. But I want to quote you again, something that you said months ago and you repeated it throughout the year. One of your strategic goals for victory was that Israel was able to reclaim its deterrence in the Middle East. I think, and here we might disagree, I think there is no doubt that we haven’t achieved that.

Yossi: I agree.

Donniel: With all the power, Hamas is smiling, Sinwar is smiling, okay we got deaf, precisely because they offer a much more complicated notion of power, which doesn’t involve merely your military power, I think there’s no doubt that Israel strategically is not in a great place.

Yossi: Look, when the Houthis bomb Tel Aviv, you know that your deterrence is shot.

Yossi: Your deterrence is shot. So that’s a fact. That’s a fact. And maybe, you know, I always had doubts as to whether a full-scale war against Hezbollah was ever worth it. But one thing we know for sure is that right now is not the time. And it’s going to take a very strong leadership to be able to say, yes, now is not the time. Now is not the time to start a new war. The population is tired. The world is not with us. There might be another time. And that means coming up with some ceasefire with Hezbollah. Maybe getting something that will enable people to move back home with some measure of security.

But the reality is, is that we have a front. There is a volcano that’s erupting and it’s going to continue to erupt on us and we can maybe put a plug in it for a little while. A day will come, but today is not that day. And maybe you need another government, a government which has much greater support, a government which the country recognizes in a greater level, a country that, or even an army, that the army officers, there’s so much instability right now.

If we want to reclaim a space, you also have to build it. We’re 77 years young now. We’re not going to, in this one year, fix all of these challenges. And it turned out that Hamas was much harder. Maybe after we have the Sunni coalition, we can go back and deal with this. But right now, we have to come up, hopefully, with what the government is saying.

And here I actually have greater confidence in Netanyahu, because he doesn’t like using too much power. There’s going to be a response. I hope it’s not too extreme. I hope it communicates something. How though we bring this two-front war or multiple-front war, not to a closure, but to some cessation for us to be able to begin to plan and to come up with a more significant strategy. That’s a very, very difficult question. And one thing I know for sure, we don’t have politicians who speak honestly enough and who speak often enough to the population to be able to earn their trust again, which puts us in a deep angst.

Yossi, last thoughts before we conclude?

Yossi: You know, we’re used to speaking here in the last months of a multi-front war. Six fronts, seven fronts, if you include Iraq, Yemen. But what happened at the army bases has opened up a new front, an internal front. And we will be in no condition as a society to effectively meet the external multi-front war until we begin to impose some basic coherence on our society. We will not be able to do it with this government. The government must be replaced. And then, I believe, from that place of relative cohesiveness, we’ll be much better positioned to deal with the long-term existential threats on our borders.

Donniel: You know, in the Israeli army, if you remember when you were in the army, I remember we never retreated. There is no word for retreating. It’s called in Hebrew, “shipur emdot leachor,” improving your positions to the rear. Maybe now is a time for us to improve our positions to the rear. And the slogan of the war is “B’yachad nenatzeach,” we will win together. We need to reclaim some of that togetherness if there’s any notion of a victory and that’s going to take us some time, and I believe, with just like you, a different leadership, and also a different political discourse, and also a reclaiming of the red lines that our society needs. Every society, and our society needs it, especially in these conflicts. Y

Yossi, I can’t say I’m uplifted but I know I had to talk about this with you today and I really appreciate being with you.

Yossi: Same here.

Donniel: Friends, this is For Heaven’s sake, Israel at War, day 298. By the time next week, it’ll be over 300 days of war and of hostages in impossible positions. May you and all of us be well.