About

Thoughtful debate elevates us all. In For Heaven’s Sake, Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the future of Zionism in Israel and on the global stage.

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.

Israel at War – “We Will Die and Not Enlist” Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Donniel: Hi friends, 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 536. And as we do each time, 59 hostages still in Gaza, 24 hopefully alive.

We decided to change the nature of the subject that we’re dealing with. Instead of looking at Israeli society as a whole, we want to focus on one issue. And there’s two reasons for that. The first is that it’s been really hard, Yossi. You know, we have a very dark feeling about where Israel is right now. And we don’t want to keep on communicating. We’re overwhelmed.

Yossi: We’re overwhelmed. We’re just overwhelmed from so many directions. And we don’t want to keep depressing our listeners. That’s part of it.

Donniel: And ourselves. And ourselves. I don’t want to scare people, but like it’s… Like what are we going to say? You know, we’re… It’s worse than last week? How is it worse?

So we want to leave the meta-Israeli society aside for today and deal with something that is dominating Israeli conversation. It’s part of the meta-issue, but it’s an issue that needs its own conversation. And that is the Haredi draft exemption from the army issue, which up to a few days ago was an essential issue, a condition for passing the budget. That budget will be passed today. And so the government will not, by definition, fall. Still, there is a deadline somewhere in May or so that has been presented, but those deadlines could move.

Yossi: A deadline for what?

Donniel: A deadline for passing the Haredi exemption. And so it’s still there, but right now our government is going to pass on its budget, solidifying its ability to stay in power till the elections in the fall of 2026.

But the most, in many ways, divisive issue between the government and the people is the willingness of the government to pass a legislation exempting ultra-Orthodox from a draft in the middle of a war. And they’re gonna do so in order to sustain their coalition even though they themselves, many of their members are adamantly against it. We don’t even know how they’re gonna pass it. But at least it’s still on the table.

And Israeli society just feels—this is insane. It’s just insane. And what we want to do today is to try to understand. Because I have a general rule that when something is completely insane, I could say, well, I’m the enlightened one. But I’m very suspicious when something is completely, completely insane and it goes back to the old philosophical principle that if someone says 41 and 43 are 86, you say you made a mistake. But if someone says 41 and 43 are 7,693,212, you know they’re not doing math.

So at this moment, I want to understand the Haredi psyche. I want to understand the government psyche. I want to understand what’s going on because most Israelis are looking at this and saying, this is insane. So you know, you could feel good when you call something insane, but at some point it just pays to question—Are you insane or something else going on?

And so we are entitling today’s podcast following a song that is sung at weddings.

Yossi: At ultra-Orthodox weddings.

Donniel: At ultra-orthodox weddings. And there’s a video of the ultra-Orthodox minister of housing dancing to the song, to the tunes, or the words of, “In this heretical government we do not believe and we will die and not enlist.” So our podcast today is “We Will Die and Not Enlist.” Maybe we want to deal with someone else’s problems instead of our own. But this is, it goes to the heart of Israeli society, to the ethos of Zionism, to the complexity, to the difficulty, to the realities that we created.

So let’s leave aside the country as a whole and look at one of the most troubling issues. How did this happen? How do we feel about it? Yossi, where do you want to go with this? How do you understand the government, Israeli society?

Yossi: So before we try to go in a rational direction, I want to stay for a moment on the insanity of what we’re experiencing. You mentioned the budget being passed. This is the most bloated budget in the history of Israeli governance. And it’s happening at a moment when essential social services are being cut in order to continue funding the war. The government is transferring five billion shekel to sustain draft evasion, to sustain that one community that contributes the least to the war effort within Jewish Israel.

And so there’s something, that seems to me first of all, a good definition of insanity, or another way to put it is it’s a definition of national suicide. Continue this way, continue funding this separatism of your fastest growing community and you’re looking at social, economic, even military collapse 20, 30 years from now. So this is unsustainable and the fact that it’s happening just as the government is renewing the fighting is really a useful definition of political insanity.

Donniel: And by the way, this, Yossi, this is your attempt not to depress our audience.

Yossi: This is my attempt to uplift the conversation and to inspire with the Israeli reality.

Now, the other definition of insanity is on their side, on the Haredi, the ultra-Orthodox side. And there you see a community that is sitting on a volcano and has no understanding of the tectonic changes that have happened in Israeli society since October 7th.

Israelis have always been upset, aggrieved, sometimes angry at the ultra-Orthodox separatism and wholesale exemption from the requirements of Israeli citizenship, especially the draft. But somehow the anger really very rarely segued into rage. Since October 7th, Israelis are walking around with a state of permanent rage about this issue. And it’s just getting worse. And that rage can’t remain contained.

But the Haredi population, our brothers and sisters in the Haredi world, and I don’t say that with any sarcasm, our brothers and sisters don’t realize that the rage against them is overflowing. And that’s going to have consequences. And what worries me is that that rage will not necessarily be expressed in only productive ways, in political ways. And I’m worried about hatred toward the Haredi community. It’s a community that I feel this rage toward, but I also love this community.

In my own spiritual development, my encounter with the Haredi world was essential. When I was a young person, I imbibed Haredi wisdom. And I’ll tell you, Donniel, something that I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about publicly. At one point, I seriously considered becoming Haredi in my 20s. And I really thought about just going, taking on the basic black and just immersing in that world. And obviously I pulled back, but I can’t forget that. I can’t forget the power and the charisma and the decency and the depth of spiritual commitment.

Donniel: So how do you understand? They’re not fools. Their rabbis aren’t fools. They’re hearing. Their political leaders are some of the most astute that we have. How do you understand their absolute disconnect from this?

Yossi: When you tell yourself a certain story about yourself and about the rest of the world over and over again, that’s the story you wake up to, that’s the story you go to sleep with, it’s a story you raise your children, your students on, you really come to believe it.

Donniel: What’s the story?

Yossi: The story is that everyone else in the Jewish people, in the Jewish world, has at the very least fallen short of what God wants of us. And more deeply and more truthfully to the story they tell themselves, we’ve betrayed who we are. They are the remnant of the remnant. You know, the Jewish people traditionally calls itself She’erit Hapleta, the remnant because of all the persecutions and how, you know, how we should have been, you know, the population of China by after 4,000 years. And so we’re the remnant of the Jewish people. They are the remnant of the remnant. They are the Jews of the Jews.

Donniel: That would say that the Haredi community sees itself as the core, the remnant. But why does that necessarily translate itself into not serving in the army? They know Haredi, they know Jewish history. Throughout Jewish history, only a remnant of the remnant of the remnant studied in Yeshiva. Not everybody studied Torah. To use Yeshiva study as an exemption from military service is profoundly, profoundly difficult.

And please remember, Jewish law on this issue is almost black and white. That for a war of self-defense, everybody, men and women, there’s no exemptions. Everybody, not the famous tribe of the Levites who were exempt from permissible wars because they had to take care of the temple and the spiritual life. And the Haredim fashioned themselves as the continuation of the Levites. But for these wars, there is no exemption. So they know history, they know reality, they know… So the story they’re telling themselves doesn’t justify what they’re doing now unless there’s other chapters to that story.

Yossi: So this is, the context is that they see themselves in a spiritual war that overrides their responsibility to the military conflict. The spiritual war began immediately after the Holocaust and the spiritual war was to reconstruct the destroyed world of Torah in Europe. And very few ideological streams within the Jewish people were as devastated by the Holocaust as the ultra-Orthodox.

The only ideological stream that was harder hit were the secular socialist Bundists. They disappeared in the Shoah. The ultra-Orthodox nearly disappeared. And the extraordinary post-Holocaust story—There were two. One is the creation of Israel and the recreation of a coherent Jewish people around the state of Israel. And the other extraordinary rebirth, smaller but also really in its way a kind of miracle, is the reconstruction of the destroyed world of the Haredim. to the extent where you have far more young people studying Torah, certainly full time, than you’ve ever had in Jewish history.

And so the spiritual war that they started out with, they started fighting a spiritual war against the destruction of the Holocaust. But that spiritual war has now become something else. It’s a spiritual war against the incursions not only of modernity, not only of the non-Jewish world, but of the rest of the Jewish world. They are in active defense to ward off Israeli society. And what they’re fighting for is their own ability to maintain this level of separatism from the rest of the Jewish people.

I’ll give you an example of how they tried to sell a story to the rest of us and even to themselves about the spiritual importance of learning Torah full-time and not serving the army, and it was really a cover for another story. The story that they’ve told us for decades is “our Torah study is crucial for the protection of the State of Israel. Without our Torah study, you will be vulnerable. We are bringing divine protection to Israel.”

Now, that story is nonsense. And we saw that story being exposed in the last few months by their own rabbis who have said that no young man in the ultra-Orthodox community, whether or not he’s studying Torah, he could be a dropout, but no young man in the ultra-Orthodox community should be drafted. Why? Because the spiritual war that they’re fighting is to protect their own community. Their full-time Torah study is not about protecting us, it’s about protecting themselves.

Donniel: I appreciate and I agree wholeheartedly. I want to add another story which you didn’t speak about, which doesn’t contradict but it’s another part of the stories they tell. And that is the anti-Zionist story. They’re also at war with the state of Israel. The reality is they are at war with the state of Israel, or at least initially.

And here we have a profound challenge of what happens when a community tells itself one story, but that story is no longer applicable or no longer confronts or makes sense of the reality in which you live.

The Haredi community started in its spiritual war, not just against secularism. It was—Israel was the greatest danger. Zionism was the greatest danger because this Zionism more than any other movement developed a magnet and a passion and a totality of being that wasn’t built necessarily on Torah. So Conservative or Reform, or particularly Reform they were at war with because it wanted to change Jewish law, and so that’s the early ultra-Orthodox battle against reforming, the Reform, that nothing new is allowed under Jewish law. But the war against Zionism was a war against an ideology that was really not only competing, was winning.

Yossi: Zionism also did something else. It created an alternative source of authority, of Jewish authority that won the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people away from the rabbis.

Donniel: To this very day, Israel is the most exciting thing happening in Jewish life. Now it’s also the most aggravating, but it’s one of the most exciting things in Jewish life for the majority of Jews whose halachic observances are marginal. Their feelings of being Jewish are very strong, but the actual Jewish stuff they do is marginal.

So Zionism was the enemy. Zionism was an alternative Jewish life, not built on Torah, not built on faith in God. And so they were raised with, when you said Zionist in the Haredi community, you were saying something derogatory. They have a love for the land of Israel, but the state of Israel is their ideological foe.

That’s where the whole exemption of military service started. It started in a community that lived in the land of Israel but didn’t want to have any part of the state of Israel. And Israeli politicians said, okay, have no part, but since you’re going to vote, could I buy your allegiance? You don’t want to have a part, and that’s fine, but when I have issues, could you please vote with me and I’ll pay? What do need? Funding, exemption, all of the above. And part of the challenge I believe that we face is that both on both sides, on the non-Haredi and on the Haredi side, that initial story doesn’t work anymore, or is facing serious challenges.

On the Haredi side, you can’t say that they’re anti-Zionists anymore, with the exception of Naturei Karta, who always go to the anti-Semitic demonstrations and say, I hate Zionists just as much as you hate Jews. You know what mean? So like, I’m a bona fide anti-Semite by extension. You know, even though I’m Jewish, but I truly hate them too. Besides them, the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox…

Yossi: And they’re are a few hundred families. There really not more than that.

Donniel: No, it’s like 20,000 people or something. Maybe that’s a few hundred families. I heard it’s 25 or whatever. And there might be extensions to it, but the vast majority of the ultra-Orthodox community are now embedded, engaged with, and full beneficiaries of an Israeli society that is supporting them on a level that no other society in Jewish history would have supported them. So they can’t be anti-Zionist.

Even your narrative that you said, that study of Torah is what’s really protecting Israel is a Zionist argument. And you know who it aggravates the most? It aggravates the religious Zionists the most. Because they have the same passion for the study of Torah, but they’re saying, I study Torah, but leave to go to the army and sacrifice, and I’m willing to die, and your Torah study trumps my Torah study? And there’s almost like a personal insight when you insult when you hear Smotrich talking.

But overall, the ultra-Orthodox community can’t argue or really morally or even intellectually or psychologically justify their distance from a country that they are now so embedded in running it and ruling it and benefiting from it. And Israeli society at large says, listen, when you are on the outside, I can almost tolerate you. You want me to tolerate you as an outsider, I could tolerate you. You know, I don’t know why, it’s crazy, but I know you hate me, but I’m benefiting from the fact that you’ll play ball with me, so I’ll let you hate me as long as you vote with me.

But now it’s so clear that that’s not your game. That’s not what you’re doing. You want me to fund somebody, not only who I need, but you want me to fund somebody who’s very happy wielding hard power in Israeli political life, who dare he sits on the security committee deciding when we go to war and when we don’t. Hostages, not hostages.

Yossi: So in other words, their very Zionization is what makes this situation so intolerable and offensive to Israelis. I think that’s a beautiful insight. I want to add another layer to that that really reinforces your argument. What we saw in the immediate aftermath of October 7th was an upswelling of love for the IDF within the ultra-Orthodox society. You saw it in the media, you saw it in the music. You had ultra-Orthodox musicians coming out with love songs for the IDF.

Donniel: Singing Hatikvah at weddings.

Yossi: So, that’s right. And a sense of embarrassment, why aren’t we there with you defending the country? You felt it. And what I suspect happened in the Haredi community over the last months is a retrenchment. Is that the rabbinic leadership said, whoa, this is going too far. We didn’t mean for you to start envying the soldiers, for you to see the soldiers as in some way the equal or even superior to the Yeshiva students. This is an existential threat to our community. So the message redoubled.

After October 7th, you would never hear that terrible song at Haredi weddings. What you heard in Haredi weddings, you’re right, you heard at Tikvah. So how did we go from there?

Donniel: Or Mashiach, or… I’m sorry, I want to suggest how we go, but if I’m cutting you off in the middle, please, please finish your sentence.

Yossi: No, no, no, this is, just that something happened that we weren’t paying attention to, that shifted this new opening to the Israeli experience, to becoming part of Israel, and that led to the reverse, not just the containment, but the reversal.

Donniel: I think your explanation of rabbinic authorities realizing that they’re, that actually Israel and Zionism, which captured Jewish life was now going to threaten to capture ultra-Orthodox, like it was having a beachhead. And I think that’s part of the explanation. And you know, they react. And you never react in moderation.

So now, and part of what contributes to it is the fact that Israeli society doesn’t have to talk to each other. We all shout at each other and call everybody each other, you know, intolerable deviants. So the Haredim are used to it and we get like, so here we fit into this pattern of mutual delegitimization. And so they’re used to it, we’re used to it. And in a certain sense, it’s a game that we all play.

But here for people who are serving 300, 400 days in the army. Not only is the number of people who died and were wounded, but literally, you want to call me up now again, and again, and again. I need bodies. The Israeli army never wanted the ultra-Orthodox to be in the army, and now we know that we need them.

Yossi: Not only are they not joining us at the front, but they’re dancing and celebrating their exemption.

Donniel: That’s what I want to talk about. I want to talk about that because I think something else is happening that we all have to understand, and that, I believe, take responsibility for. I believe that the ultra-Orthodox have to be drafted. I believe that it’s insane. It’s insane for an Israeli society to fund at percentages higher than anybody else in the country a community that’s draining all of the economic security foundations of this country. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s just, as you said, it’s suicide and it’s insane.

But what’s happened here? I think we have to take responsibility for the fact that we embrace this. We made the deal. We made the deal. Ben-Gurion made the deal. He made it a long time ago in which he said, okay, I don’t need you. The truth is, I don’t like you. I really don’t like you. You’re the old Jew who showed up here. I really wish you hadn’t, but you’re here. And so the Law of Return applies to you too. You build your own society separate from me and I will fund you as a completely autonomous reality within Israeli society.

We have a two-state solution within Israel. There’s autonomy. There’s a group with complete and total autonomy to do whatever they want. They could teach whatever they want. Their economy is different. Everything, even the prices of the food in their stores is different. The whole story. This is an autonomy.

Yossi: But they were small enough initially to be able to absorb it.

Donniel: To be able to sustain. That’s correct. But I think it’s not just the size. I think Israeli society separated from the ultra-Orthodox just as much as the ultra-Orthodox separated from the rest of Israeli society. And what happened is for 70 years, we funded a community which had an infantile and hostile relationship to the state of Israel. We allowed it.

Now, you don’t get to wake up one day and say, oops, you’re too big. I just had a war that proved to me that I need a bigger army. I’m changing all of my opinions. Let’s start all over again.

Yossi: New ground rules.

Donniel: Now you get to say that, but you don’t, just like you don’t get to say peace now, I don’t believe you get to say draft now. I think we have to understand the profound cultural alienation of the Haredi community from everything that we’re talking about. From service, from participating.

You know what amazes me the most? Not that the minister Goldknopf was at the wedding and he was dancing, whether he understood that they were changing the song or not. This is a known song. They’re dancing at a wedding. Imagine, I want just to paint the picture to our audience. If you want to hear it, go on the Times of Israel website and look up “Goldknopf video at wedding.” Just to see it. A group of people dancing at a wedding while Israel is at war and joyfully singing, “we will die and not enlist.” We will not show up at the draft offices. These are songs. This is a song. It wasn’t just made up on the spot. The community knew it. They know the words. That means this is culturally indigenous to who they are.

Do you think you’re just going to press a button and now all of a sudden this group of people is going to say, okay? Now I don’t believe this is principally even a cultural thing anymore. I think it’s now become a psychological issue. They are used to an infantile relationship. We’re seeing them as infantile. They see themselves as the elite saviors. So everybody’s happy. And you think you change that overnight? You think you change that through legislation?

We Israelis have to take responsibility for the cultural reality and infantilization of ultra-Orthodox. I want them in the army now. There should be no exemption, even for anybody who studies in Torah. We have to get rid of that exemption. Period. There’s no grounds for it. None whatsoever. We need people, my children, you know what? Go, like I did when I was younger. I studied in Yeshiva and went to the army back and forth and back and forth. And when Israel needed me, I was at the front lines. I was part of the security establishment. There’s no grounds for this separation anymore.

But to think that you can make this cultural transformation in one minute, it’s gonna take 10 years. We need to start going into the elementary schools and say you want a dollar of funding? I don’t want to talk to you about math and English because I want you to be a part of the cultural or the economic rebirth of Israel. You have to go down into the elementary schools and change the way they talk about Israel otherwise they’re gone. Zero funding. You want to be an outsider? No problem. Be an outsider but I’m not going to infantilize you anymore. You want to be outside? Zero contribution to your schools, zero contribution to your poverty, zero contribution to building anything. You want to be a minister of housing for the country? No.

But you have to do it slowly. And what we should be doing is saying, let’s come up with a number now. There’s a cultural readjustment, Yossi, that needs to be made. Yossi, please.

Yossi: Okay, would you cut off all funding right now for their institutions?

Donniel: No, in 10 years. In 10 years.

Yossi: Donniel, we don’t have 10 years.

Donniel: But you don’t have soldiers.

Yossi: The reason I say, but listen, no, listen, I hear you and I appreciate what you’re saying, but you have to factor in the political reality here. We have a significant party, not just a party, it’s not just the Likud.

At this point, it’s the entire hard right that is ready to continue subsidizing this, as you rightly called it, infantile relationship of, on the one hand, total dependability, and on the other hand, total separatism. It’s as if you have a child whom you’re subsidizing completely all of your child’s needs, and your child says, I am not beholden to you, I don’t listen to your authority, I hate you.

Donniel: I hate you, I hate you, I’m not coming to see you in the hospital, I’m not helping you, don’t come—but your money is kosher. Not your food, but your money.

Yossi: That’s right. That’s right. And I, as a parent, say, and I, as a parent, say, oh, bubbeleh. Sure. You know, that’s so sweet.

Donniel: I was very tough on you, yes. My success was difficult for you, yes.

Yossi: So we have part of the political system, which is in government today, I believe will be thrown out in the next election, but could come back, two years, four years from now, and reinstitute the entire system. And so there needs to be, we have to go cold turkey.

Donniel: No, we don’t. There’s another opportunity which I want to refine. It’s not between nothing and cold turkey. By the way, cold turkey doesn’t work either. It’s very rare. It usually causes profound damages. What you need to do, even someone who’s a drug addict has, there’s things that replace, again, I’m a big, I know all about this because I watch movies. There is a process. You realize the body doesn’t move from one stage to the next, either physically or psychologically.

I would set right now a serious number, call it, not 80,000, 5,000, and say, this is non-compromisable. This is 5,000. If you don’t accept this, I cut you off now, cold turkey. 5,000. I am now gonna work with you over a gradual plan in which it goes from 5,000 to 7,000 to 10,000, et cetera, year by year by year.

In 10 years time, there is no longer an exemption for students who study in Yeshiva. You want to study in Yeshiva? Do basic training first. Train in a certain unit so that if the country needs you, you’re going to be ready to go. Period. You have now 10 years. And now let’s talk about the process of, how do we re-educate, re-eculturate. How do you take an infantile society… you can’t just take someone who’s been an infant and throw them into the ocean and say swim. It’s a process.

But the problem is everybody here now, it’s not just that we want the ultra-Orthodox to be drafted. We want to win. We want to succumb. We want to defeat. How do you draft ultra-Orthodox? How do you show that being drafted doesn’t mean endangering your identity and your society? Ten years. Ten year process where every year we lower, we have benchmarks. If you don’t meet them, we cut the funding.

And I think there is a moment where we see a problem. Why can’t we do it in a menschlich healing manner, even though we know that the reality right now is existential? But because we have an existential problem, it doesn’t mean that you have a clear-cut singular solution to solve your problem. We created this, and I think we have to take responsibility and think about this differently. It’s almost like a moment where we have to challenge the ultra-Orthodox community. Do you want to rise with us? Or do you want to break with us? You don’t get to now rise in the midst of us on your own without taking responsibility. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the time. Now let’s build a process.

Last words, Yossi?

Yossi: Look, I love your plan and it’s right. It’s right on so many levels except for me on one level. And that is the political practicality given the Israeli reality. And this is what’s so frustrating about Israel in so many other ways is that our reality mitigates against sensible solutions. And I don’t think we have a sensible solution here.

Donniel: So, then you know what is gonna happen, Yossi? Before May, in order for the government not to fall, they’ll pass an exemption again. So, like, can’t we try here? You know what? Between me and you, our job with our listeners is we wanna think about the Israel that we want, but we know that there’s a gap between that. But unless we start talking about the Israel we want, one thing is for sure, we’re never gonna get there.

So, when we talk about defeating them, it’s just not going to happen. It’s a good vehicle to carry my anger and my hostility and my frustration and my trauma and all of the above. But I think it’s our job to put forth something more positive. But I promised you the last word.

Yossi: Yeah, now I…

Donniel: Just say, Donniel, I agree with you. I’ll give you that last word.

Yossi: Again, I agree with your sensibility. I don’t think that you’re offering a viable way out. And unfortunately, what’s likely to happen is the government will pass the wholesale exemption law and the country will erupt in ways that are totally unpredictable and many of the responses will be counterproductive and that’s how we manage or mismanage our crisis.

Donniel: Yeah, I hear you. I promised that, but I wonder whether that’s inevitable.

Yossi: Donniel…

Donniel: No, no, I’m holding. I’m holding.

Yossi, I first want to say first, it’s always a pleasure being with you. But today in particular, because I feel like you and I took a journey away from our problems to another problem. It’s like we went from one, we went from the, from this huge problem to this other huge problem. But I was able to talk about somebody else.

Yossi: So you know, know, Donniel, you know what my last word is? My last word is not about whether a given solution is going to work. My takeaway from our conversation is the conversation itself, that you and I just had a conversation over one of the most aggravating issues in Israeli society. And I think we were coming away from this feeling a little bit more expansive and generous in ourselves, I know I am, than how I entered this conversation.

I entered this conversation, I had my boxing gloves on. And I’m coming away from this conversation saying we really have to have a better conversation than we’re having, regardless of what the solution is. And it may well be a brutal solution of cold turkey, but even if it is, we need this kind of conversation.

Donniel: One other thing that I’m coming away with is that as there’s dark times, sometimes just pointing and again talking about how dark it is, is not always good for us. And maybe over the next, like sometimes we’re gonna do that and sometimes pointing and talking about different aspects of Israeli society. The Israel that we love and the Israel that we wanna build.

Maybe, you know, that gives us, maybe, you know, like last week you said you need to breathe. Maybe this is a strange way that we were breathing. Yeah, me too.

Yossi: I feel that I’m breathing now.

Donniel: Yossi, I love you.

Yossi: Love you too, Donniel.

Donniel: Really good being with you. Friends, this is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, day 536. There’s conversations now maybe of some interim ceasefire, five people, Israel’s insisting on 11. May by the time we meet again next week, may some of our children and family come home. Be well, everyone.