The following is a transcript of Episode 98 of the For Heaven’s Sake Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hello, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast For Heaven’s Sake, our special series, which has been going on now for quite a while, Israel at War, today’s day 54. And this is the sixth day of the ceasefire. And our theme for today is unity until victory — Question mark.

One of the things that we’ve all experienced, and Yossi, I’m sure you’ve experienced it as well, is how in the aftermath of October 7th, and as the war commenced, everything was quiet.

All debates were removed. There was a peacefulness that descended on our society, which was very different from the profound conflict and arguments that permeated our existence for close to a year. There’s slogans which you see all over. There are even slogans on the news. “B’yachad nenatzeach,” together we will be victorious, or the one that we picked, with unity, “achdut ad hanitzachon,” or until victory. 

There’s a sense that there was something broken and we embraced some newfound unity around tragedy and around a cause to what most, what is it, 90% of Israelis believe to be a necessary, not just a just, but a necessary existential war against evil.

But we’re six days into the ceasefire. And while there’s a ceasefire with Hamas, there’s beginning to be a return of the internal warfare. Going to war created a ceasefire in Israel. And now that there’s a ceasefire, things are emerging. And some of the old divides aren’t hidden anymore. 

And the question that we want to think about today is are we going to be able to sustain this unity? Are we going to be able to sustain it in the next couple of days, once we resume round two? You see debates around the budget and budget allocations. You see threats of Itamar Ben Gvir leaving the coalition if we won’t fight until the end.

There was almost a culture of discussion that we insisted on at this moment. Now we don’t do politics, even though everybody was doing politics, but you don’t do overt divisive politics. And over the last six days, together with the exhilaration of the return of the refugees, together with all of the deep emotional embracing, there’s also a return of some debates around the hostages, around lots of things. 

Do you think that the war could whitewash or override the core inner debates? Are we going to really have unity until victory?

Yossi: I don’t think there’s any issue that can drive a wedge in Israeli society as long as we’re at war with Hamas. I don’t think there’s any issue, including massive international pressure, that can undermine the resolve of, according to polls, 90 percent, right? That’s what you were quoting, 90 percent of Israelis support war until the destruction of the Hamas regime, except for one issue, and that’s the hostages. 

And until now, as we’ve talked about on previous podcasts, Donniel, the Israeli public embraced two goals simultaneously and refused to acknowledge the possibility of any tension between them. The first goal was defeating Hamas, and the second goal was bringing the hostages home.

Now according to reports that we’re hearing, Hamas intends to put an offer slash demand on the table: All the hostages in exchange for an Israeli secession of the war. Not a ceasefire. An end to the war. If that is put on the table, I’d love to know your sense of it, but my feeling is that a majority of Israelis will take a deep breath and say, we have no choice, this is existential, we must bring Hamas down. 

But a minority, and perhaps a substantial minority, might revolt and say, for us, this is an existential issue. This is an issue that defines the character and the quality of who we are as a people, and we will not sacrifice the hostages.

How do you see that playing out?

Donniel: The Israel that I’m in contact with doesn’t give expression to that at all. 

Yossi: To what, to giving into… 

Donniel: To giving into a Hamas demand of cessation of war and also the emptying of the jails of Hamas terrorists, even though I think for most Israelis, if it was those two they would do it. I don’t think that’s the issue. It’s like the old Gilad Shalit mistake, I think we’d do it again. 

Yossi: Yes, exactly. 

Donniel: Like, or whatever it is, that they won’t do. That won’t be. But I don’t see anybody really pushing that. I think maybe, you know, the families can and that’s their job. I don’t begrudge them. That’s the job of the families. I think the language will be that we have to return the hostages regardless of the cost, and we have to continue the war regardless of the cost. How did the two live with each other as we talk? 

People, I think, choose to be ignorant about the contradiction. And I don’t see anybody at this moment, as you said, like we spoke, 90 percent, when do 90 percent of Israelis agree about anything? So I don’t think that’s going to be a divisive issue. I think though,

Yossi: Even, Donniel, even if it’s brought to a head, even if we can’t manage to continue to pretend that there isn’t a contradiction?

Donniel: I think Jews are able to pretend forever. You know, that’s Jewish law, like, you know, we joke about it. This is, we’re, you know, we pretend lots of things all the time. So I think we will continue to pretend. And one of the things I’ve been seeing also in the press in Israel, there’s, it’s very, very controlled. There’s a lot of things we’re not seeing. They’re controlling what we’re seeing. 

And this message of continuing to fight to victory, the government’s in, I think the press is in, the majority of Israelis are in. I think the consequences and the meaning of October 7th is still self-evident and so I don’t see the hostages creating that conflict. 

I feel the pain of the families. I think we’re going to have to make a collective decision. I think we already made it. I don’t think we’re ever going to give up on returning the hostages. No one is going to talk explicitly about, do this and give up on that. No, we’re going to want to continue to hold on to both and function that way. And in doing so, not being naive politically, but reflecting the complexity of our values and not willing to give up. 

I don’t see disunity around that. You do see, however, the hostage deal is not going well. You know, we all embraced it. We were getting kids back. We want our children back. We want mothers back. But now there are children who aren’t being returned. There are mothers who are being separated from children. It seems that Hamas is able to say whatever it wants. 

One of the key conditions was that we were, Red Cross was supposed to visit so that we could have a full accounting of every single person. We know personally our colleagues who have family, wounded family there. Everybody wants to know. The uncertainty is unacceptable. And the Red Cross coming at the first day should have been the condition of stopping firing. And now we’re on

Yossi: The fact that the Red Cross didn’t call a press conference and publicly demand of Hamas to allow visitations, that they didn’t create a public campaign, they simply accepted Hamas’s no, is one of the unspoken scandals of this war.

Donniel: You know, here you and I are so different. We love each other, we’re so the same and we’re so different. It’s like, I have no expectations. You’re still kvetching about the… It’s like… Like you’re…

Yossi: You have no ex… ah, wait, if you say you have no expectations of the Red Cross, that’s even worse than what I’m saying. I’m saying I gave them some benefit of the doubt.

Donniel: But it’s like so funny. Like you know whether they did like it’s just so inconsequential to me. My government, me, we shouldn’t have stopped fighting. We’re continuing the ceasefire and letting Hamas dictate the terms and I’m sensing in Israel, you already see it, you know, I follow 14 news sites on a regular daily basis. I’m sensing, I’m reading, I’m hearing between the lines. We’re being led by them and here, if there is any disunity emerging, it’s around this dynamic. Yossi: Of how we’re handling the hostage situation and by extension how we’re handling the war?

Donniel: Not yet by handling the war, we’re going to come to that. But the hostage situation, it doesn’t have the competency, the desire to control, the desire to determine, the Zionist ethos of expressing our will and our rights as a people. Hamas, after all the damage that it so-called suffered, is still functioning and dictating the terms.

And you sense a lot of unease in Israeli society about this and we will remember. But the hostage issue, I have a slightly different read than you on it, but let’s, that could be, is there anything else that you see emerging? The old conflicts coming through, how do you see them playing out as we return to the war? You know, we’re going to return in a couple of days. Are we going to go back to an internal ceasefire?

Yossi: I think we will, and really, for me, the litmus test has been all along whether those of us who have been demonstrating against Netanyahu for a year will continue to hold our fire until the end of the war. And it’s very hard. It’s very hard for me. But I recognize that the Israeli public, which is more or less with us on the need to get rid of Netanyahu after the war, will not tolerate a protest movement against the government during the war. 

So I think that particular ceasefire will continue to hold. There are other issues that are percolating. There’s settler violence on the West Bank, which very few Israelis have the capacity right now to pay attention to. We’re so focused on the war, but that could blow up any time, and then that has the capacity to open up a schism even during war. 

I don’t know, Donniel, I think that the extraordinary unity that came into effect literally overnight from October 7 to October 8 has held. And I’m not as hopeful as you on the hostage issue not being a wedge, but other than that, I don’t see any issues dividing us, do you?

Donniel: Yeah, I see two issues. And the pace of change here is dizzying. Somebody listened to this podcast recently, something we taped two weeks ago, and they wanted to talk to me about it and argue with me. And I said, well, I only thought that was relevant two weeks ago. You know? I go, you and I are trying to get the pulse of this country on a daily basis, and it’s just changing. 

There are two things that I think are emerging that we have to watch. One is the budget. The debate around the budget. Benny Gantz and his coalition did not vote for the budget. And Yair Lapid is attacking. And the issue is the coalition allocations and the use of coalition allocations for the sake of the war and for the sake of the rehabilitation of the kibbutzim and villages in the Gaza surrounding. And part of what you see in the budget, and nobody knows exactly what’s happening, is the maintaining of coalition allocations, or to some degree. And it sort of symbolizes that we are unified until victory, but I still have to look after my tribe. 

And Smotrich, who got Haredi votes, he was able to take some, he wants to ensure that he’s still seen as a Haredi supporter. He still wants to support his settler and settlement agendas. While the whole country, including Smotrich, is in this new mode that other, the old divides haven’t disappeared.

They’re there, and in some ways, some of them are going to get stronger and stronger. And I think what’s going to make them even stronger is the much more serious divide that I think is going to emerge once we go back to fighting again. Because the first stage of the war was under the pall, if that’s the right term, of October 7th. This second stage is gonna be under the memory of October 7th. 

It’s not the experience as much, it’s the conviction, and it’s not the same. It’s not the same. And as we continue to fight, I think part of what came out during this ceasefire, and as we look forward, we’re not gonna have an Entebbe moment. If we do, somewhere in the next few days or weeks or so, some massive victory, which will be, you know, so clear. That will be a unifying moment. But this is a long haul. 

And in the long haul, how much do we fight? Do we declare victory unilaterally even if we know we didn’t have it, similar to the way Netanyahu did in the past? What does victory look like? Is it really reasonable to assume that we could wipe out Hamas? All of these issues are going to emerge. 

And I’m not even including, at another time, I really want us to talk a little bit about our relationship to the world, because the world’s not going to continue to relate to this war in the same way. Let’s even commit ourselves to talking about this in depth. You press pause, and then you press whatever it is, you know, go again or tape, and you assume you’re in the exact same place. But I don’t think we are. 

I think that the war itself is not going to be as unifying, especially when the results aren’t the unequivocal victory that we want, and then these tribal old divides will emerge. Who’s for? Who wants to fight another day?Who is the national fervor, the national victory, for whom, morality, listen, morality hasn’t really been a serious issue in this war as an inner Israeli concern. 

All the old divides, the old tribes, like I see this in the coalition, we’re still tribal, and I think the second stage of the war, we have to watch it. I’m not sure we’re going to be unified until victory.

Yossi: I don’t think that we’re moving to the memory stage just yet. And I’ll certainly speak for myself. I’m still very much in the stage of trauma. And I think it’s true for the society. I was thinking today, Donniel, about the great shock of the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community, was the 1929 Hebron Massacre, which was terrible atrocities, bodies that were abused in unthinkable ways. It was 69 people. And the Yishuv didn’t recover. That was a formative event for the Yishuv.

This is far and away the most horrific event to happen in the entire history of Zionism. And so I think that it still will have the momentum, the emotional momentum, to carry us through in the coming months. But I agree with you that the way in which the war is being fought, and we’ve swept that under the rug in the first stage. I think there was just such an enormous relief that the army is back and the army is fighting in a professional way. 

And the big question mark that we had on October 8th was, can the army that failed so miserably to protect the border and then to stop them inside the kibbutzim and the towns, is this army capable of fighting effectively? We now know that it is. And so that first stage was really under the shadow of that question. And it was almost that, you know, we’re not expecting Entebbe right now. We just want to see that the army knows how to fight. 

Now I think, in this stage, here’s where I think, where I would agree that something is shifting, there’s an expectation, a higher expectation in the public. Okay, we see that Tzahal, the IDF, is back, but what’s the plan? Why is this dragging on? And we may not have months and months the way that Benny Gantz and others have been talking about. The clock is ticking. The international community is getting more and more edgy. And so that will impact, I think, on the impatience of the Israelis.

Donniel: You know, just to clarify, you know, when you speak about 1929, that was the event that inspired or caused my grandfather to leave Israel and move to the United States. 

Yossi: Oh, really, really. 

Donniel: Our family moved to Israel in 1830. And we lived in Jerusalem and after the massacre of 1929, it just wasn’t safe and he moved to New York and came back in 1966. We moved in ’71. So I’m not claiming that October 7th is no longer relevant. I’m not. I’m not claiming its emotional pull and its effect, but I think there’s still a difference. It’s the curse of time. It just doesn’t.

And things, by the way, today speed up much more than in the past. The immediacy of it, the constant being flooded with things. You see it by the way, in the world. You see how October 7th had one power at one time, and now it’s already November something, I don’t know, 27th, like you still want to claim that life should be seen through that prism? All I’m saying is that it’s still going to guide us, it haunts us. It is what leads to the 90% wanting to defeat Hamas.

But the unifying power of October 7 changes. It’s now more of a memory. And now politics are allowed. You’re not desecrating the memory of October 7 by talking politics. And so as we look at Israeli society, everything that we’re saying today might be irrelevant in another week. But right now, as we are emerging from a ceasefire, there’s other things emerging at the same time.

And I think we’re going to have to be prepared to fight part of this war with more political debate without the comfort of this unity. I think we just, we have to take it into account, as, I see it emerging right now. I see it in the budget. I see it in Ben Gvir. I see it in Lapid. I also see it in some of the people who are leading the demonstrations, led the demonstration in the past, who are, you know, you shared with me. They’re talking about renewing the demonstrations. 

Yossi: There’s a restlessness.

Donniel: There’s a restlessness. And the ceasefire unleashed that restlessness. And it means that not all, we’re not in some utopian moment of togetherness, which is going to last forever. Serious problems, we have different opinions on them. You know, this is again, something we need to talk about. Part of the way in which you deal with serious problems is not by saying, shh, Jewish unity, shh, October 7th. 

Part of the way you deal with serious problems is you talk about boundaries. What do you share? How do we tolerate each other? Which opinions we can accept, which we can’t? What are the boundaries of public discourse? I think, we can’t continue to live as if October 7th is going to provide us with all the guidance that we need. As we re-need the war, I think we’re going to have to think about something, about finding other sources of that strength, or even other ways even to talk about the issues that we disagree with, more as the days pass.

This is For Heaven’s sake—Israel at War—Day 54, day 6 of the ceasefire. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes or visit shalomhartman.org forward slash Israel at War.

A few more days of ceasefire, at least I feel, would be welcome. And so let’s embrace those and embrace the people who are coming home.