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
Donniel: Hi, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute, and this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, Day 305.

One of the things, Yossi, that you and I, we’ve been experiencing as we tape these sessions, I don’t know if that’s what we should call them, but they’re sessions for the two of us, and therapy sessions, therapy sessions is that we pick something that’s relevant that day, but the pace of change is so insane that within 48 hours, it almost seems that we can’t even remember.

So last Tuesday, we sat and taped, and our primary issue was the, we called it this volcanic eruption of moral corruption. Then, in the midst of the war, it just went too far when groups of people came out and argued for the righteousness of soldiers, regardless of what they did, and attacking the judicial process.

Yossi: And physically attacking an army base.

Donniel: And physically attacking an army base. Over what? Over the right of Israeli soldiers to, hopefully not, but that they should not be investigated for acts of sodomy. That was a low that hit both of us, but within 24 hours, the next day, or that evening even, Israel assassinated Shukr, who is known as the chief of staff of Hezbollah, and one day later, somebody assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas. And our world changed.

We spoke about two volcanoes. But the real volcano, this potential, last time we spoke about a potential volcano erupting from the north. And now, since last Wednesday, we’ve, all of us have been sitting and waiting for a sword to fall. Waiting for a sword to fall. And we don’t know if by the time our audience, our listeners hear this, whether tonight Iran will have responded and Hezbollah and what, what our life is going to be like. A half hour ago, we started to tape this session. And the electricity went off. And we said, okay, it started. It’s like, it’s just, we’re living on this edge of this very strange existence. And it is an edge that we’ve really been on for over 10 months because we’re not really trained for this. We’re not used to this level of ongoing war.

But the war has shifted. It’s shifted from a focus on Gaza, which is progressing or not, it depends on which news site, are we in this, are we in the same place, worst place, progressing, not progressing, who’s winning, I have no idea anymore, to what we’ve chosen to call today’s session, War by Retaliation. Something’s going on. Who started what? I know, we started by just, you know, being here in 1947. But Iran has been funding a war and arming its proxies who are attacking us and killing us. And last week we responded to the 12 children who were killed in Majdal Shams and we assassinated Shukr and then the next day we assassinated Haniyeh.

There’s this retaliation process. And now Iran is saying, you started, so who started what, when, I, it’s just, everybody counts wherever they want to count, whatever fits to whatever narrative they want. But this war by retaliation has changed the whole dynamic of Israeli life. Everyday life in Israel is very different. It’s not just the war itself, which we have to think about, and I want us to talk about. It’s also what it’s done for our whole existence. When you look at this war of retaliation, what are the first things that come to your mind?

Yossi: I was very proud of Israel for having the daring, the wherewithal to hit our worst enemies deep in the heart of Beirut, Tehran. And I also experienced it as a kind of relief, Donniel. I felt relieved that we still have it in us. And I think that beyond the feelings of revenge, which of course many, many people experienced as their initial emotion, I think that Israelis generally felt relief. We still have it in us. We still know how to protect ourselves. And after October 7th, that’s an open question.

And what also made me very proud of the Israeli reaction is that we all knew what this is going to mean. We knew we’re going to have to go back into the shelters that we’re living in. Our normal life is, has now been put on borrowed time. And yet, almost every Israeli, regardless of one’s politics, responded in the same visceral way. We had to do this. We had to show our enemies we’re not afraid of them. We needed this for our own morale boost. Regardless of, and yes, we know that they’re going to, that these people are, are replaceable and the next one will be just as bad, maybe worse, didn’t matter. At that moment, Israeli said, we’re doing what any country in our place can do.

Donniel: I had similar feelings but with a slight variation. I don’t think we took into account the consequences. And I’ll come to that in a second. I felt proud, part of me, for the same reasons that you mentioned. You know, they were remarkable military and intelligence achievements.

I also felt, I’ve wanted Haniyeh, I hope no one will get very angry at me, but I’ve wanted Haniyeh dead for a long time.
Yossi: I’ll give you a pass on that.

Donniel: When he, for years, this is a man, I know, somebody all of a sudden decided that he’s a moderate. Again, I have, I leave that to other people to figure out. This is a man who has been directly involved in ordering the death of Jews and Israelis for years and years and years.

Yossi: And then celebrating publicly.

Donniel: That’s, when I saw him smile…

Yossi: Oh, the gloating on October 7th.

Donniel: On October 7th. As he’s in his, must be $20,000 suit. He has suits, the man is so corrupt. The whole package.

Yossi: You know, you just mentioned something that was astonishing to me. I was reading the obituaries in the New York Times elsewhere. No one mentioned that he’s a billionaire. A billionaire. And he started out in a refugee camp as a construction worker.

Donniel: Only 10, 15 years ago. Within 10 years, he has succeeded in robbing the world. The Palestinian people of over a billion and possibly multiple billions of dollars.

Yossi: And he was eulogized as a quasi-saint.

I had to get it out of my system.

Donniel: Okay, good. I appreciate that. Because like, I don’t even, like, I listen to them and I don’t even know if I’m supposed to smirk. Just let it be. I’ll let that part be. But the truth, I have wanted him dead for a long time. This is a man, this was our enemy. And so part of me was just, yes, this is justice. Part of me also, there is a part, and I know I don’t, I’ll admit to it, I’ll deny it later, is that part of me also wanted vengeance. Part of me wanted vengeance. And you know, there is this poster of all the faces of the leaders who instigated October 7th. And there’s only one face left: Sinwar. And on every face, it was like America had that deck of cards. You remember that deck of cards in Iraq?

Yossi: That’s, really we, the, the principal organizers are…

Donniel: It’s all done. It’s all done. The only one now is Sinwar.

Yossi: Well, that’s one definition of victory.

Donniel: That’s, you see, but this is where we, this is what we need to talk about. Because is that a definition of victory? So I know, I felt that Israelis accepted this as justice, accepted this as right, accepted it as vengeance, not in an immoral vengeance, a moral vengeance. But yes, there is a sense of an eye for an eye that I don’t, our tradition rejects an eye for an eye. But just like the person responsible for the killing of the 12 children in the soccer field in Majdal Shams. He should be dead. And so Shukr was dead. There’s a price to be paid.

And there was something, it’s not that I’m doing it for the sake of vengeance. It’s just that there is a distortion that needs to be corrected. And I think that’s what Israelis accepted. I don’t think anybody, and this is where I’m getting nervous, I don’t think any of us, I didn’t, fully internalized the consequences.

Yossi: Well, that it would mean missiles on, on Israel? I think we’ve been there so many times before.

Donniel: We haven’t. I’m not, Hezbollah is one thing, Iran? A five-front missile attack? I don’t think we fully internalized what does it mean to take out Haniyah in Tehran. I know we gloated by it. There was, there the pride was, but could we have taken him out somewhere else? We decided when and where. The consequences of that are bringing us to a radical transformation in our life. And this is not a strategy of how you take on Iran.

Yossi: Do you regret it?

Donniel: Part of me now does. Part of me now regrets choosing to kill Hania in this manner. The benefit that we got is being outweighed by consequences. You know, we’re sitting here now for a week. Israelis, the black humor, it’s like we’re, it’s this strange existence which is not befitting of a first world country where we basically don’t know, people say, okay, see you tomorrow, if there’s an Israel, like this is part of the conversation.

Yossi: See, I have no regrets and I certainly don’t think that we should be looking back. But what I’ve felt for a long time, and we’ve discussed this, is that we don’t have a strategy. And tit for tat is not a strategy against Iran. Blinken, the other day, said something that stunned me and still, I’m still carrying it. And it went past the public discourse virtually unnoticed. He said that Iran, if it chooses to, is two weeks away from a bomb. And I thought, where is the strategy? Yes, I believe that we should have taken Haniyah out, but that’s almost a sideshow. The main question is, how do we stop a nuclear Iran? How do we come to terms with the fact that this is not a war against Hamas or even Hezbollah? It’s a war against Iran. And I’ve been saying it here for months.

Donniel: For years, for years before this podcast.

Yossi: For years. But now I feel an urgency than I haven’t felt before. We’re at the moment of truth, and we’re busy with assassinations.

Donniel: You know, you use the word tit for tat. And that’s what we’ve been doing with Hamas for years.

Yossi: And then we changed the strategy.

Donniel: And then we changed the strategy. Well, their response was not a tit for a tat. And we changed it. That’s the game we’ve been playing with Hezbollah as well. There’s a code. Hezbollah fires first because, you know, we’re firing in Gaza. Then we fire back, and then depending, if we hit somebody, they fire back. And there’s these rules of who, they fire principally against army bases and against evacuated villages and towns and cities. And the whole northern section of Israel is a demilitarized zone, empty of citizens. And in that tit for tat, they seem, it’s all on fire, they seem to be winning, but that back and forth. But tit for tat was just, we don’t need a strategy. We could sort of contain, it’ll be this sort of a balance. But when you start a tit-for-tat, that’s what bothers me with Haniyah.

Someone said, they’re playing chess and we’re playing checkers. It felt like checkers. Like, really? If this issue is, as you mentioned it, this long term strategic issue. Does this help? Does this undermine the Sunni coalition? Does this bring America closer to standing up and saying, this is something that we have to all deal with? It’s sort of, it gave Iran a pass. The world is now saying, yes, Iran, you could attack Israel. The question is how bad it will be or how many missiles will get through. If you only get a few missiles through, if you just take out, let’s say the gas fields or you just take out one desalinization or two desalinization plants, okay, that’s measured. You’re allowed to attack Israel. That’s okay, because we, after all, attacked you.

This whole equation, if, however, you attack multiple sites in Israel, and we’re not able to stop it, and there’s no, not a sufficient coalition, then you’ve gone too far, so then Israel could go back, and what are we going to do?

Yossi: So, there are two issues here for me. The first is the lack of a strategic plan to deal with a nuclearizing Iran. And the second is the shattering of our deterrence. The fact that we’ve been sitting for a week waiting, what is this? And that everyone,

Donniel: Talk about what, tell our audience a little bit, what’s been going through your mind this last week?

Yossi: The apocalyptic humor that I exchange with friends. Last night, I couldn’t sleep, and it’s 2, 3 in the morning, and I hear this loud boom from the road. Turned out it was a motorcycle, but I physically jumped. I jumped out of my chair, and that, and I looked at myself, and I said, ah, there’s your resilience. In other words, this much-touted resilience is thin. It’s a veneer. And we’re all walking around with this sense of weight over us. It feels to me like when the air gets heavy and humid before a major storm. That’s what this week has been like.

But beyond the emotional experience, what it says strategically about our situation is that, you know, I mentioned a moment ago that I appreciated the assassination because it showed that we’re not afraid of our enemies, but this waiting period shows they’re not afraid of us. There’s no deterrence. They’re choosing their time and place and everyone is indulging them.

Donniel: But it’s insane.

Yossi: Yes. It’s insane.

Donniel: There is something insane. And each one of us, we could actually put together a booklet of the strange things that people have said to me. One lady said to me, oh yeah, last night at two o’clock at night, I made a cup of coffee and put it in a thermos so that I could take it to my, to the shelter. And someone else says, you know, I don’t want to be in the shelter in my underwear. So what I did is I put pants on the way so that…

Yossi: I’ve had, I’ve had that same thought.

Donniel: I’m not that worried, I don’t, it’s like literally, it’s, but that’s beyond the water and the canned goods and you know.

Yossi: Are you well-stocked?

Donniel: I’ve been eating through my stocks, so it’s like, it’s kind of a problem. But the Institute decided that I should have, as President of the Institute, I should have a satellite phone. First of all, it made me feel very, very important. Now, I have a satellite phone. I just can’t figure out who I’m going to call.

Yossi: The Institute should provide me with one so we can communicate.

Donniel: But that’s my problem. I don’t know, if everybody’s cell system is down, who I’m supposed to talk to on my cell phone. So I’m walking around, I like this, I have a satellite, me and the ministers, I can call the ministers. There’s something, and you know when I realized how strange this last week has been when I talked to people, our loving, loving friends in the United States and Canada, who have been calling and WhatsApping and, and just truly concerned and, and you talk and you just start talking about and then you realize this must sound insane, because you literally do not know if tomorrow morning, what’s going to be. Are we going to have water? Are we going to have electricity? But all of that has been allowed.

And that’s why, see, you go back, and I don’t want to debate, but I think there’s more and more evidence for my position saying that I’m not sure that taking out Haniyeh, assassinating him, this war of retaliating back and forth, instead of a war of strategy. I’m frightened that since the war in Gaza is not going the way we want it to go, that this will fill the category of victory and it’s not. You yourself know, it’s not.

Yossi: Maybe, maybe. You might be right. But if we hadn’t assassinated Haniyeh, would we then have a coherent strategy. I don’t think so. I don’t think this government is capable of a strategy. And so, you know, we say in Hebrew, zeh mah yesh, that’s what we’ve got. Then second best is take these people out one by one.

Donniel: So let’s delve in a little bit into this whole notion of retaliation. Both of us accept that there is no long-term benefit to this. This is not taking us where we need to go to. And the concerns that you speak about, the long-term needs, it actually works the opposite. This week, at least it was reported, that Prime Minister Netanyahu said, I don’t want to even try to do a deal with Saudi Arabia until the next election. So he seems to have time. He has time.

And what they’re planning, I’m just frightened that we’re going to have continual wars of retaliation. Iran is going to attack us. And then we’re going to be bombing back. And then everybody will try to keep it. I sort of measured what exactly this does, like how many missiles, hitting where. Each time in a war of retaliation, you have to show that you’re better. This is the pressure that Iran is under. They sent 350 missiles and only two landed. They can’t go to the same failure, because in a war of retaliation, you have to up the game each time. You got me. Now I have to get you. So we’re going to have to get you.

There’s something about this, though, that is very deep in the Middle Eastern and also in the Israeli consciousness, this issue of retaliation is not new in our story. It’s been an ongoing part of the Israeli military ethos. We’ve been attacked. It goes to the issue of what you speak about, and that is the notion of deterrence.

Yossi: And so in the absence of deterrence, knowing that we have lost our deterrence to a large extent, I think that’s what this proves. Then the question is, what is the value of these targeted assassinations? And there’s one more aspect which we really should mention, and I don’t want to get you off-topic, but I do want to bring this up, that is the impact on the hostage negotiations.

Now, I’m hoping that when they sat around at the table making the decision about Haniyah, they had a serious conversation about the impact on the hostage negotiations. Do I believe that this government really did that? I wish I could say so. Have the hostages been relegated now to a footnote? And we know that Netanyahu’s priority is not the hostages. It’s reclaiming his lost legacy. That’s, for me, that’s what this now is about. And so I worry. I do. That is the one, there I will concede. That’s the one point that I, I deeply worry about.

Donniel: We didn’t even speak about that. I think there is no doubt that if you were concerned about a hostage deal as something that was a major priority, you would not be assassinating the person who you’re negotiating with, who you’re speaking to, who then passing the information on to Sinwar. That just doesn’t make sense. There’s no doubt.

See, I think it’s perfectly legitimate. I don’t agree with it. But I think it’s perfectly legitimate for the state of Israel, and this is a position you held, but you didn’t want to talk about it early on in the war, that we needed to destroy Hamas, even if it meant a profound price to the hostages. But nobody in Israel has had that serious conversation with the except of the far right. Even they, everybody’s dancing and saying, oh, if you would have done what I did, the hostages would have been free. But a serious question, what is the price we should pay or not pay? It’s a heavy price. But for this? For this? For this, in a war of, of retaliation?

Yossi: Alright, but there is a counterargument, which is, if we reached an impasse in the negotiations, and you’re negotiating with an organization like Hamas, the assassination of Hamas’s leader can focus the others. I don’t know. The point is that we don’t know. Neither of us know.

Donniel: We haven’t seen it. I haven’t, we’ve seen, they’re not even talking if they were so pressured. Sinwar doesn’t seem to me that pressured, I don’t think losing his life is such a big pressure to him. Haniyah. I don’t know what he, he certainly was not that pressured when his children died. The whole demeanor of Sinwar, of Haniyah as well, but I think here too, again, the notion of a strategy that you’re, what’s your strategy with the hostages? What’s your strategy with Iran? What’s your strategy to bring the war to an end?

Yossi: Exactly. See, if this was part of a strategy to saving the hostages, I could hear the argument, even if it turned out to be mistaken. What worries me is that just as there’s no overarching strategy to deal with Iran, to deal with the genocidal regimes on our border, there may well not be a strategy for saving the hostages.

Donniel: What does war of retaliation do to us? Is there a price? Think about it. Is there a price? Here it is. You and I debated a little bit the value in this context, but is there a price to a war of retaliation, besides the pride and the momentary high?

Yossi: I’ll give you an extreme example of the price that I saw us pay, and that is a coarsening of the Israeli ethos. And the extreme example I want to bring up was there were a few, just a few, but nevertheless, it was a telling moment. Israelis were offering sweets to passersby after the assassination. Celebrating. And where did we take that from? From the other side.

And here I will bring up the comment by our finance minister, Smotrich, the other day, saying that it’s justified for Israel to “starve to death,” he used that expression, two million Palestinians, but the world won’t let us. In other words, what I hear you asking is, do we begin to take on the world’s worst attributes of our enemies when we enter this kind of war? And that’s a legitimate concern.

Donniel: I see it on myself. I was happy for the first 12, 24 hours. Here, you know, Yos, I hold my side. I am profoundly impressed by my own moral standards. I really, I re-impress myself on an ongoing basis, but I wasn’t, I felt good. There is something enticing about a war of retaliation. It’s also one of those that we thought we have handled. But I think part of what we’re confronting now is that these are categories that we could have used. We used war retaliation very famously. It really starts in Israeli society and I think primarily in the 50s, it might have happened in the ’48 War too. But in the middle 50s when there were Fedayeen terrorists penetrating.

Yossi: It became military doctrine.

Donniel: It became military doctrine that of retaliation, that there has to be a balance of fear somehow and a price. And I think it’s still part of Israeli doctrine, but we’ve fallen in love with it without asking whether it’s effective.

Yossi: Ah, but you see what, what you said a moment ago is important. The rationale for the doctrine was not revenge, but creating a balance of fear, the question that needs to be asked is whether that’s still effective. And whether we’ve lost that rationale, whether we’re even thinking about it.

Donniel: Whether we even care, because that’s a very important distinction. In a war of retlation, you know, it depends, there could be a retaliation in a sense of retributive justice. In theories of punishment, there’s retributive theory of punishment and there’s a utilitarian theory of punishment. Why do you punish a prisoner? Why do you respond? One is that you do it because it’s the right thing to do. They did X and they should pay a price.

So, there is a retributive notion that if you kill children, if you are killing Israelis, your life should be taken. There is something to that which has some value. There is the utilitarian one that you just spoke about, that here it is, if we do not have some level of deterrence, if you think that you could go crazy and we’re going to be civilized, sipping our tea, you have to know that we’re going to get down into the trenches with you because it’s the only way we can survive in our battle against you.

But I think that was the original ethos, but we’ve lost any assessment of whether it still has any utilitarian value, any at all. We’re still destroying terrorists, the parents of terrorists’ houses, not the terrorists themselves, their parents, their family houses. I haven’t seen any dramatic decrease in terror activities since we started the destroying of homes. And that’s what I’m asking, whether we’ve gotten into retaliation, retribution without an ethos, without a vision. Whether it’s just, you know, we’re becoming Middle Eastern in that sense, and maybe, and Prime Minister Netanyahu was saying, you know, that’s where I, that’s my source of power. This is where I win. I win by showing that I’m going to lead Israel in this way, instead of leading it with strategy, instead of asking also the bigger questions of who do we want to be.

Yossi: You know, Donniel, one of the problems that I have with our conversation is that it disorients me. I don’t want to be equivocal about these assassinations.

Donniel: Regardless of what I say.

Yossi: Exactly. No, no, really. I came into our conversation determined to defend the legitimacy, the necessity of the assassinations. And then I get disoriented. And then I go home and I continue the argument with myself, with you in my head. And look, I’m deeply grateful. That’s the truth. But I think what I’m really trying to say is it’s really difficult when you’re in this kind of situation to have this kind of conversation when you feel so existentially threatened. You need to be certain. You know, you need to put a limit on self-examination. And yet, where will we be as a people if we shut that down?

Donniel: See, where I agree with you is that I’m not filled with any moral anxiety. That’s where I started. I’m with you. I don’t have a moral anxiety about the right of Israel to defend itself or whether Haniyah shouldn’t be alive or not. And I felt the same way, I’m even making room. And I think it’s just this, after October, when people are killing you, it’s perfectly legitimate to also have a desire for vengeance. That’s okay. To have or want to desire for revenge, that’s also normal.

Our tradition, by the way, even, you know, we know, that’s the Bible. To claim that we’re so totally free from that, but we don’t need to be. So, in that sense, I’m joining you in your initial statement. My question is, in the long run, as we sit down, not critique it morally, but ask ourselves, what is the direction that we want to go to as a country?

These victories, then there was the Olympics, so it’s like it was, okay, we, you know, in the, the retaliation Olympics, we just won and we got six medals, but we got these two medals before the Olympics, and it has a game quality.

Yossi: Come on, Donniel, admit that you were excited about the Olympic wins.

Donniel: I was. Who’s, who’s, listen, as a Zionist, everybody has to, you know what I mean? Listen, I grew up in a country where the idea of having a medal was, and I don’t know, in the Israeli newspaper, I don’t know if you saw it today, we counted how many medals we won and how many medals all the Arab countries collectively. It’s like, we’re, we can’t stop. We can’t stop, Yossi. That’s why we’re talking about it. It’s like, enough. So it’s one thing you want to be, do it in a stupid way. Okay, we’re all allowed to be stupid, but that’s okay.

But now this war by retaliation, instead of, you know, it’s a judo match, it’s like, war by retaliation? At what point are we gonna stop and give ourselves a moment? But if we do not go through the confusion that you went through, you know what’s gonna happen? We’re gonna be hit. I don’t know how hard. If we block everything, we might be able to block more from Iran. Our ability to block everything from Hezbollah is much smaller. I already know if I were them, what I would do, but I don’t want to tell them because they’re listening to this podcast. But I know exactly what I would do if I was them.

And if not enough comes through, then they’re going to have to go again. And if they don’t hit it exactly at the right balance where it gives them a little sense of victory, but without hurting us too much, otherwise, what are we going to do? We’re going to retaliate because this is the war that we know how to fight right now. We can’t fight the war of victory. We can’t fight the war of getting rid of our dangers. What we could do is fight a war of retaliation. That’s the general bottom line. And that’s not good enough. That’s all. And that’s my day. Last word, Yossi.

Yossi: The question is that when we get hit, and God willing, it won’t be too severe, what do we do? Do we not hit back? That’s a very practical question beyond the philosophical conversation. And the last, last word, Donniel, is

Donniel: I don’t know, by the way, I’m giving you the last word, because I don’t know. I really don’t know. But it’s this question that it’s, it pays to ask, because for every act there’s a consequence. So what are you doing? Where are you going? So I don’t know. The question is very, very, is deep and serious. And I’m going to leave it. I’m going to say, I don’t know. And now you have the last word.

Yossi: My last word is just that I’m grateful for our chavruta and for our friendship.

Donniel: And you should be well and everybody should be well. And it’s just strange. It’s beyond strange how we even have some sanity. Listen, we’re both searching for wisdom, and we both don’t feel that that wisdom is fully embodied by the people who are making the decisions. So we talk. Maybe someone will listen.

Friends, this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at war. Maybe now a different war. I don’t know if it’s day 305, it’s day 305 for the hostages. I don’t know if it’s day 7 of this war. Everybody be safe and be well. Thank you, Yossi.

Maital: : You can now sponsor an episode of For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War. The link to donate can be found in the show notes or at shalomhartman.org/forheavenssake. We will acknowledge your gift on a future episode.
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/israelatwar.