About

Thoughtful debate elevates us all. 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 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.

Israel at War…with Itself 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. Today is day 424. And this is our series, Israel at War, and today our title is Israel at War—With Itself.

And Yossi and I, we had lot of ambivalence about today’s topic. We feel that it is a central issue defining the reality in Israel today, and it’s our job to share it with you. But it’s a reality that’s very confusing, troubling, unsettling and even surprising for both Yossi and myself.

When Israel goes to war, everything about our country focuses on helping to protect Israel. And it’s not just the Maslow pyramid where the most basic survival needs are given priority. In Israel, it’s something much deeper. It’s that, and thank God it’s that because we’re normal people. But there also is a very strong ethos of collective responsibility built into 3,000 years of Jewish tradition. Collective responsibility is part of the way we do Judaism. That’s not the way we do peoplehood. It’s one of the essential commandments of the Jewish tradition. And we focus and we care.

But there is something going on in Israel today that we’re finding ourselves having to make sense of, and that is in the midst of a war, we are beginning to be at war with ourselves.

Now, it could be that in the past this was also the case, but what happened in the past, if this is normal, is not comforting. It’s a deeply troubling moment, in particular given the sense of enormity of the consequences of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. This is not a little skirmish. There’s something major going on. Yet the press, the public discourse, which is emerging in particular and principally, though not exclusively, but principally by the government, its spokespeople, ministers in the government, cabinet, members of Knesset, of the coalition in which it seems that our primary enemy is not only Hamas, but it’s anybody who doesn’t agree with whatever it is that the government and some of its ministers are just deciding to do. And anybody who takes a different stand is either factually wrong, antisemitic, or anti-democratic.

And as the elected officials of Israel, they have a right to do anything. As one minister said, we’re the majority. We have a right to overturn the system of government, if we so desire. There’s attempts now going on to bring more and more of the press under government control through controlling the allocation of funding. There’s a whole litany. It almost feels like every day it’s like we’re being punched by a new legislation, a new statement, a legislation which will make it harder for Arab parties or easier to remove Arab members of Knesset or parties from running.

It’s just, you know, the list is almost endless. Every day there is something, whether it’s the attorney general, whether it’s the, this is constant, whether it’s the head of the security forces. Everybody who is not aligning itself with supporting the government at this moment is anti-democratic. Anything that you want could be put on the table. Most recently, the divides between the ministerial authority and the police and the army. It’s like, everything has to serve the interests of the political mechanism under the notion that in a democracy, if we want, it’s all ours.

I was thinking about this, that this government, this war is, you know, the aspiration was to achieve total and complete victory. But when this government won, it said, we have a total and complete right-wing government. And total victory was to do whatever it is that we wanted to do. This is what started the judicial reform. In two months, that majority rules without recognizing that a majority, which is not constrained by checks and balances and rule of law, is its own dictatorship.

There’s this constant onslaught. I think there’s a method to it too, to wear you down. It’s to constantly put forth something. And I know, Yossi, like I concentrate in my own life very much on, as a teacher, on what’s happening to Israeli society, to the individuals. Where are they? You and our conversations with each other, to say that you’re deeply troubled is, it would be an understatement. But the breakdown of the system is shaking you to your core. And we have to talk about it because if our job is to talk about Israel at war, what happens when Israel is at war with itself?

Yossi, where does this story finds you right now?

Yossi: You had said a moment ago, Donniel, that we may have had other examples in our history of infighting during war or immediately afterwards. And what came to mind most vividly was the immediate aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, when Israeli society really tore itself apart. there was what was called the War of the Generals, if you remember.

And even the chief rabbis, the Ashkenazi and Sefardi chief rabbis went at it. Israeli society responded to the devastation of Yom Kippur by turning against itself. And the great movements, extra parliamentary movements of left and right, Gush Emunim on the right and Peace Now on the left, really emerged in the post-Yom Kippur atmosphere.

And yet, this somehow feels different. First of all, because the war isn’t over. I was in Shaarei Tzedek Hospital today, and you walk into the lobby, and there’s a big display, a table, with framed little photographs of fallen soldiers. And each photograph is accompanied by their story. And I don’t know why these soldiers were on display. Maybe these were soldiers who passed through the hospital, maybe they died in the hospital. And there was something so overwhelming. You know, you’re going into the hospital for whatever personal needs we all have, and suddenly you’re confronted with this, it was just a checkup, and you’re overwhelmed with this collective trauma.

And it hit me that we are a society that is overwhelmed by multiple levels of mourning. We’re mourning for the soldiers. We’re mourning for the hostages. Some of us are mourning for the devastation that we’ve been forced to inflict on our neighbors. And on top of all of this, many of us are mourning for what we’re doing to ourselves, for what our government, our leaders are doing to us. And I don’t know which is the most painful.

And for all of this to be happening at the most devastating moment in Israel’s history, without any pause, you know, bringing us right back to the day before the massacre, right back to October 6, except worse, because the assault against democratic institutions is intensifying and it’s taking multiple forms. It’s against the media, as you mentioned. It’s against Arab parties. It’s against, the government is trying now to weaken and destroy the Israeli Bar Association, which has been a primary bulwark against their judicial moves. And so in every direction, you feel that the government has resumed with even greater intensity and greater fervor. It’s a war against democratic norms and institutions while we’re still in the middle of this.

Donniel: Do you have, as I’m hearing you, Yossi, I want to ask you a question, but if I stopped you and you still want to continue, ignore my question. Do you have any sense? Could you give a why? Could you make sense of it? I know this is—it literally is hurting you. It’s keeping you up at night. It’s like there’s something incongruent. Any explanation do you have?

Yossi: So I’ve been trying to channel my right-wing youth growing up in that world. And what was I thinking then? And what might I have been thinking now if I hadn’t left that ideological camp? And Netanyahu said something very revealing in one of his recent speeches. I think this was a speech against the Shin Bet’s investigation into the scandal that’s happening.

Donniel: Shin Bet is the security.

Yossi: Yes, in Hebrew we say the Shabak, it’s known around the world as the Shin Bet. Our internal security service, and conducting an ongoing investigation into a scandal in the prime minister’s office, we’ve dealt with it in previous podcasts. And Netanyahu said, well, the security services have taken a young man and they’ve brought him into their cellars and they’re interrogating him day and night. And under those conditions, a person would be willing to admit any crime, whether he committed or not, even the crime of killing Arlozorov.

Now, he said that in passing. I don’t think Israelis of this generation know what he was referring to, but as someone who grew up in Beitar, in the right-wing revisionist Zionist movement, that hit a nerve because what Netanyahu was really…Arlozorov was Chaim Arlozorov, who was assassinated in 1933, and he was the head of…one of the heads of the Labor Zionist movement.

And I see by your face that you’re getting bored and you’re right to get bored. But the fact is, if you want to understand this government, you have to understand Arlozorov and everything that Arlozorov represents. Because the Labor Zionist movement immediately accused the right wing of assassinating Arlozorov. And one of the leaders of the right, Avram Stavsky, was arrested and exonerated. He was acquitted in a British trial in the in 30s. And to this day, there are veterans of the Labor Zionist movement who are convinced that the right murdered Arlozorov.

When I moved to Israel in 1982, we’ve talked about this, beginning of the First Lebanon War, Menachem Begin, in the middle of the war, Donniel, announced the formation of a commission of inquiry into who killed Arlozorov 40 years before.

Donniel: So this is a package that the right wing is carrying.

Yossi: What this tells you is that the right believes to this day that they have been hounded by the left. And that Netanyahu, and Netanyahu believes this into the depths of his soul, that there is a left-wing cabal that is trying to bring him down because he couldn’t be defeated electorally.

So we’re going to bring him down to the courts, to the media. Everything that’s happening, look, and this is, would say, the charitable explanation for why the government is assaulting our democratic institutions, because they believe that these institutions are in fact not at all democratic and are out to destroy the right-wing majority. The less charitable argument is that this is a collection of demagogues and incompetence and fanatics for whom power is an end all. And I think that both explanations are part of the picture.

Donniel: I’m trying to watch it also. And the Arlozorov reference, I wasn’t bored at all. I’m a little jet laggy, but I’m not bored. It’s not my…

Yossi: Because it’s funny, know, Donniel, when I speak about Arlozorov, my heart skips a beat. It’s like I’m 16 again. Right? The injustice, the outrage.

Donniel: I hear you. It’s like I’m wondering how our listeners, would say, OK, Yossi’s an interesting fellow. When I look at the decay of the Israeli public political discourse, you know where I trace it back to? I trace it back, again, in my memory, it wasn’t this bad. A few years ago, we were stuck in this cycle of elections. We were an un-rule-able country. The divides were deep. The schisms were unbelievable, because the fight was, who’s going to win?

And then as the second, the right wing got a little bit of a majority, Bennett pulled it out from under them and formed an alternative government. And the sense of betrayal on the right was complete and total. It was like, what happened here? You, who ran to the right of us, now move to the center, and you started to speak about the well-being of the country as if the well-being of the country is distinct from the well-being of our right to advocate for our ideology, for the true right ideology.

That government lasted for a year. And the onslaught against Bennett’s fellow party members by the right was unbelievable. And ultimately, they resigned, brought down the government, and there was a new election. But as distinct from the perpetual cycle, for the first time in memory, there was a, what was called, as I said beforehand, a right-wing government, yemin yemin al maleh, right, right, completely. There was no compromise. This was not the standard Netanyahu coalition where he had people from the left and the right and the center to, to extensively correct him and help him. This was just a complete victory.

And the first thing that they did was this judicial revolution reform, like we could now do anything. We could do whatever it is that we want to do. There are no constraints. Now the right, know, Netanyahu, because he’s not a full right-wing person, he’s much more moderate, but now he was the left part of his government and we’re going to do anything we want. And the far-right got the most significant ministries. It was as if, you know, you’re running around in a toy store and you could do anything you want to do. Anything you want, now we could do. And we’re going to do it quickly.

It’s interesting that as they did that and began that process, not only were they not able to, but they lost the support of the majority of the country. And this coalition, which is 64 seats, now with Gideon Sa’ar, I think it’s 69, in every one of the polls dropped to the low 40s, mid 40s. Now sometimes it goes 48, 50. They have no chance to rule again. Something broke even for themselves and they’re trying to reclaim something. So they’re at war with a country that is rejecting them. Their agenda is being rejected.

Now when you add to it the deep critique of October 7th, who’s responsible? And in any sane society, whoever’s in power at that time, especially someone who’s been in power for, what, 15 years? Setting this, you know, I was joking about it the other day. The Minister of Transport of England resigned recently. Major news in England and was reported in Israel because she, 10 years ago, reported her telephone was stolen and it wasn’t stolen.

I think the press in Israel, like she was so…

Yossi: Yeah, really, you know, by that measure, by that measure, the whole Knesset should have resigned 10 times over.

Donniel: Like, really, 10 years ago, she just said, I can’t do—but there is this attack against the government, and there’s almost this war of—we’re at war to protect ourselves.

Yossi: I’m really glad, Donniel, I’m really glad you’re taking this in this direction of trying to understand what’s motivating the government. And the reason that I’m glad for that is because I just don’t have the strength to do another episode of expressing outrage against this terrible government. But you know what? The truth is I do have the strength and that’s the problem. I have an inexhaustible capacity to express outrage at this government, and it’s starting to bore even me. So this is good. This is good.

Donniel: But this is not outrage. I’m trying to understand. But it’s not outrage. It’s like psychologically, they were on the cusp of total victory.

Yossi: No, no, no. I want this. No, no, this is what I’m saying to you. This is good, Donniel. Let’s try to understand them a little bit more. And here, let me go back again into the psyche of the right. The right has an inferiority complex which no amount of power and electoral victory will be able to uproot. And that psychological inferiority complex has two sources.

The first is that the right deeply believes that it was responsible for creating the state because it was the right that drove out the British, not the Labor Zionists, and yet the Labor Zionists took power. And the second source is that it took 29 years, I don’t know if there’s another democracy anywhere where you had essentially an uncontested government. We had formal elections in Israel between 1949 and 1977, but the results were known in advance. You could not unseat the left.

And so the right has this sense of being a permanent opposition, even when they have been governing, in Netanyahu’s case, 17 years. The longest lasting, God help us, the longest lasting prime minister in Israel’s history. And so, the right has this saying, which is, the country elects a right-wing government and it gets a left-wing policy.

Now let’s unpack that for a moment. The only real territorial withdrawals that we’ve ever had were done by right-wing governments. Menachem Begin with Egypt in the late 70s withdrawing from Sinai. And then Ariel Sharon withdrawing from Gaza. The left talks about withdrawing…

Donniel: What about Y? Remember, Netanyahu and the Y agreement withdraws from Chevron.

Yossi: So there is, in one way, there’s some truth to the saying that the right has never been allowed to govern. On the other hand, let’s not buy into that self-pity completely, because the right since 1977 has fundamentally changed the map of Israel. The fact that there’s an open question about whether we can even create a two-state solution anymore is because the right has succeeded far beyond what anybody believed they’d be capable of. The right has changed Israel religiously. Under successive right-wing governments, the ultra-Orthodox, separatist community has grown in a way that no one could have imagined. So when you look at the last 40 years, to say that successive right-wing governments come to power and all we get is a left-wing agenda is actually ludicrous.

But that’s not the point, because emotionally, right-wingers don’t feel as if they have ever truly governed. Now, what they’re really saying is we have never been able to totally dominate this country, frankly, in the way that Labor Zionism dominated Israel in the early years of the state. And that’s true. But Israel has changed. We are much more accepting and aware of our pluralism. We’re a much more consciously pluralistic society.

And so no part of the political spectrum would be allowed to totally dominate this society the way that Labor ones did. But for the right, there’s this sense of envy. If only we could be what the Labor Party was for 30 years in this country.

Donniel: And then when they finally got it, judicial reform backfired. And then the greatest insult is that October 7th happened under their watch. According to their narrative, that’s a left-wing story. So all the explanations for October 7th, who’s to blame for October 7th? 2005. If we just had more settlements, some—that’s why you can’t take responsibility.

So I understand there’s this anger. They’re losing the country. I know you don’t want to project, Netanyahu is still the largest party, but every single poll shows that the current coalition will not be able to form the next government.

Yossi: They’re at least ten seats away.

Donniel: We don’t know what will happen in two years’ time. Netanyahu is brilliant, absolutely brilliant.But part of their methodology right now, in order to be able to reclaim their space, is to declare war against anybody who disagrees with them. And that, you talk about changing Israeli society, that’s also changing Israeli society. That level of discourse, you know, I know other countries have it and, you know, they compare this to other governments and other leaders, but that doesn’t comfort me in any way, because the consequences for Israel are too grave and we’re too small. This war against ourselves is devastating, right now.

Yossi: You know, when I think of the changes that need to happen, the morning after this war, and even saying the morning after this war, it’s such an amorphous sense of time, is, are we in the morning after? Because fighting is really wound down in Gaza. I mean, you were telling me off-mic that you feel that the war in Gaza is essentially over and it’s become an occupation.

Of course, the fighting can be renewed at any time in Lebanon, but we may be approaching the morning after. And what we, many of us, hoped for the morning after this war was the beginning of a process of healing. And that healing begins with recognizing that we need to stop seeing rival ideological camps as enemies of the state. They may be very wrong. They may even be dangerous for the future of the state. But their intentions are no less honorable than my camps, whatever my camp or your camp is for the sake of this argument. And that’s a foundation for healing.

Instead, we’re going in the opposite direction. And I know that what is being aroused in me by this government is the counter-response, which is, you think I’m the enemy of the state? You’re the enemy of the state. And that’s taking us back to the edge of the cliff. And how do we pull back? How do we pull back?

Donniel: So if we, you see, if we would analyze the nature of the discourse right now, and we, because, you know, we’ve been watching it and talking about it together and trying to understand it. When there was judicial reform, one side said, I won the election. We’re a full right. We’re now going to have, as you said, a right-wing government with a right-wing policy, and we’re going to do whatever we want.

Opposite that was a whole group, the majority of Israel, which coalesced around a values discourse of a pursuit of democracy. And we don’t want to give up our democracy. In many ways, the country took what used to be a right-wing agenda because liberal democracy was really preserved in Israel, not by the Labor. It was preserved by Menachem Begin and the Likud.

Yossi: Absolutely. He was this country’s greatest Democrat.

Donniel: It was like clear. So here it was. A coalition was formed with right-wing center and left to protect Israel’s democracy. And so the right-wing found itself marginalized from within, lost 30, at least 30% of their own supporters. That was a year ago.

Now we come to October 7th and the greatest stain is on them. And again, the country is distancing themselves from this government, not for democracy, but because they’re not taking responsibility for their mistakes and for being in power.

But now what happens is that the right wing is saying, we’re the ones who are going to protect Israel. We’re going to protect Israel from another October 7th, which is strange because it happened under their watch. So in order to do that, they have to blame everybody else. But the other side is not presenting a values agenda. They’re presenting, just not Netanyahu. And in this context, the discourse, the healing can take place.

And I’m wondering whether that’s the reason for the remarkable popularity of Naftali Bennett. Like, look, the truth is nobody really knows him. He was prime minister for a short period of time. He made an unbelievably courageous decision, but which is lauded by all the people who didn’t vote for him. Right? He’s the most beloved politician by the people who didn’t vote for him. But now he’s become…

Yossi: Well, the courageous decision was to bring an Arab party into government, which the right-wing…

Donniel: It was to bring an Arab party and to form a coalition, a broader form of coalition. Now, though, he’s getting 25 seats in every poll. There’s people coalescing—

Yossi: I can’t remember a situation like this where a party that doesn’t exist would win the next election.

Donniel: We don’t know who—he’s ostensibly—this time he’s trying to find people who won’t stab him in the back. And he’s doing his work. But I think that what people find attractive about him is what you said. And that is we want to heal. And so who is a politician who will help us heal? Gantz used to have that role. He doesn’t have it anymore. People can’t identify what it is that he stands for. Yair Lapid is not a healing force.

And so we’re looking for a healer and maybe that’s the next coalition is a coalition which where we realize that maybe we can’t achieve complete and total victory. We have to give up that language. There’s not complete and total victory in Lebanon. There’s not complete and total victory in Gaza. Nor is there going to be complete and total victory by any ideology. And maybe we have to just start healing.

Like, what’s going to be the policy of this government? Is a Bennett government going to be able to do courageous moves? Probably not. But maybe what Israel, the majority, seems to be saying, we just want to stop our war against ourselves. Yossi, last thoughts and feelings.

Yossi: The candidate that manages to project a credible commitment to healing will probably win the next election. And that election, I sense, is going to be fought between those who are stuck in October 6th and those who are in October 8th. And what keeps me going, what gives me hope in this really unbearable time for all the reasons that we’ve been talking about, is that I believe that a majority of Israelis are in the October 8th camp of healing.

Donniel: You know, and those who are in power, it’s really strange. So they want to convince Israel that they could still bring total victory of some form. And the other part are looking for healing. It’s interesting. That will be the, that’s the election campaign. And I wonder, you know, whether the politics of fear and nastiness wins or not. Who knows?

Let’s pray together both at that healing. Maybe it could start a little earlier. It would help if Bennett would actually announce, so we could actually have some public discourse, but if not, that’s our job. That’s our job. And that healing, and for many of us, again, we never stop every podcast. It’s 424 days. There is some conversation that may be some hostage conversation is progressing. So just you and I, let’s join in prayer that that is truly so. And in the meantime, Yossi, thank you. A troubling time. A troubling time for Israel. A troubling time for lovers of Israel. And hopefully the healing forces will emerge. Thank you, Yossi.